A Monferrato wine family that turned to pomace.

Distillerie Berta is a family grappa house in the Monferrato hills of Piedmont, with its registered office and working distillery at Casalotto, a hamlet of Mombaruzzo in the province of Asti. Its own history starts a generation before the distillery. The company says its forebear Francesco Berta was a vine grower and landowner, and that of his two sons, Giovanni stayed at Casalotto to grow grapes while Michele became a pharmacist in Milan, turning raw materials his brother sent him into liqueurs.

The distillery itself was the work of Giovanni’s son, Paolo Berta. The company says Paolo studied oenology — its museum shows the bicycle on which, it says, he rode the 40 kilometres to the oenology school at Alba each day — and was working as an apprentice in a cellar at Canelli in 1945 when he met Lidia, the daughter of a delicatessen owner. In 1947, the company says, the couple married, settled in Nizza Monferrato and built their first distillery on the ground floor of their house. Forbes Italia, profiling the company in its “100 Eccellenze Italiane” series in March 2021, gives the same founding year, and the company’s slogan today is “Italian Spirit dal 1947.”

The next generation arrived in the 1980s. The company dates to 1983 the decision of Paolo’s sons, Gianfranco and Enrico, to follow their father into the business; it describes Gianfranco as the man of the cellar and Enrico as the one who travelled from northern Europe to South America and Asia selling the bottles, with Gianfranco’s wife Simonetta running the administration. In 2002, the company says, the distillery left Nizza Monferrato and returned to Casalotto, the hill the family came from.

Steam, wood and a long wait.

Berta makes grappa by a discontinuous method, and its website sets the process out in some detail. The company says it collects pomace from selected wine producers and sends them reusable bins with a small valve in the lid that lets air out but not in, so that the pomace stays fresh and moist for months; each bin carries a label recording the producer and the kind of pomace. It distils with steam in small batch boilers, in what it calls three steps — a first distillation, a cold filtration and a second distillation that separates the “heart” from the heads and tails — and says the same plant also distils wine for brandy and whole grapes for its grape spirit.

Ageing is the centre of the brand. The company dates to 1998 the moment Paolo Berta opened a cask of grappa he had set aside years before, and with it the start of its Selezione Riserva line, beginning with Roccanivo. Its cellars are built underground: the company describes a vat cellar of Slavonian oak, where the grappa spends its first year; a barrique cellar of French oak from Tronçais and the Allier, where some spirits stay for twenty years; a research and development cellar; and a fourth cellar called SoloPerGian. Forbes Italia described four ageing cellars in 2021.

The aged range is sold as the Selezioni, with names such as Tre Soli Tre, Roccanivo, Bric del Gaian, Casalotto and Paolo Berta, the last named for the founder. In March 2023 Forbes Italia described the Paolo Berta Selezione del Fondatore as a 2002 grappa of Nebbiolo and Barbera aged twenty years in barrel. Alongside them the company lists younger lines called Primaneve and Oltre, the Elisi and Unica pair, and a range of liqueurs.

The name of one cellar is also the name of a grappa and of a foundation. The company says it created the SoloPerGian project in 2015 in Gianfranco Berta’s name, and that the foundation helps young and older people into work.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Italian grappa names: Berta, Mazzetti d’Altavilla, Marzadro, Bocchino, Sibona, Castagner and Bonollo. Grappa is a spirit distilled from pomace, the skins, seeds and pulp left over once grapes have been pressed for wine, so a grappa house depends on the wineries around it, and its range is often organised by grape variety, by the wine the pomace came from, or by how long the spirit has spent in wood.

Many grappa houses still carry a family name, and several of the brands here are linked to the northern regions where much of Italy’s grappa is made, including Veneto, Trentino and Piedmont. A family name on a label does not on its own say who owns the business today, where the pomace is distilled or where the bottles are filled, and a single surname can belong to more than one company.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its grappa is distilled and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A distillery that became a group of houses.

Berta is still a family company. The company trades as Distillerie Berta S.r.l. from Casalotto, and the Berta family has owned it since 1947; its own history says Paolo and Lidia no longer work in the distillery, and Forbes Italia’s 2023 profile listed Annacarla Berta, Chicco Berta, Giulia Berta and Simonetta Ghignone as the people behind it.

Since 2012 the business has spread beyond the still. The company says that in 2012 it took over Moriondo Carlo, a maker of Piedmontese amaretti, and bought the Castello di Monteu Roero, a castle in the Roero that it reopened to the public; that it opened Villa Prato, an eighteenth-century villa in the centre of Mombaruzzo, in 2016; and that on 3 May 2022 it opened Borgo Roccanivo, an events venue, with an evening by the sports journalist Federico Buffa. Visitors to the distillery can tour the stills, a museum of the company’s history and the ageing cellars, and finish with grappa and amaretti, the company says. Since 2004 the distillery has also hosted the Corporazione degli Acquavitieri Italiani, which the company says began in its tavern among a group of friends and each year names “Dame e Cavalieri” from public life.

The labels have become a place for collaboration. For its Art Collection, the company says, it paired three Italian tattoo artists with three of their students — among them Katia Polastri and Aurelia De Luca — to draw one label each for a blend of young and aged grappa, brandy and fruit spirit, sold in a box drawn jointly by all six, so the buyer learns which label is inside only on opening it.

For a design guide, Berta shows how a grappa house can build its identity around time in wood, family names and the hill it came from. Compare Nonino, the Friulian grappa family, and Nardini, the Bassano grappa house. For this guide we use aged amber, barrique brown and straw with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Berta’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.