Piazza Castello, a herbalist’s recipe and a royal customer.

Carpano dates its story to Turin in 1786. English Wikipedia says that in that year Antonio Benedetto Carpano, a distiller born in Bioglio, near Biella, made a modern vermouth from white wine and an infusion of more than thirty herbs and spices, and that the drink proved so popular his shop was soon open around the clock, citing drinks reference books by Stuart Walton and Brian Glover and by Sharon Tyler Herbst, both published in 1998. Italian Wikipedia is more careful: it says Carpano was among the first to make modern vermouth in Turin rather than strictly its inventor, but that he was among the first to turn it into a brand still sold today.

Italian Wikipedia also says that at the time Carpano did not own a shop of his own but worked for a popular liquor shop run by Marendazzo, under the porticoes of Piazza Castello, citing the City of Turin’s tourism pages. The name, it says, probably came from the German Wermut, meaning wormwood, the plant at the heart of the recipe.

The company’s own history, published on carpano.com by its present owner, adds detail. It says Carpano had studied to be a herbalist, that his shop stood opposite the Royal Palace, and that he sent a crate of vermouth to King Vittorio Amedeo III, who adopted it at court. It says that in 1820 his nephew, Giuseppe Bernardino Carpano, gave the business a legal form as a liquor and vermouth factory “formerly Marendazzo,” still under the porticoes of Piazza Castello, and that in 1898 the brothers Luigi and Ottavio Carpano, the third generation, set up a factory. VinePair also dated the move to factory production to 1898 in 2025. The company names Cavour, Massimo d’Azeglio and Giuseppe Verdi among the shop’s customers.

One point sweet, half a point bitter.

The house’s best-known product is Punt e Mes, a red vermouth with added bitterness. Italian Wikipedia dates it to 1870 and tells the story as legend: on 19 April that year, in the Carpano shop facing Turin’s stock exchange, a stockbroker distracted by a share that had moved a point and a half answered the barman in Piedmontese, “’n punt e mes,” and a vermouth corrected with half a measure of quinine bitters took the name. The company tells the same story and adds that regulars ordered it with a gesture: a raised thumb for the point and a flat stroke of the hand for the half. The name, the company says, stands for one point of sweetness and half a point of bitterness. Italian Wikipedia, citing Susanna Agnelli’s 1975 memoir, says Giovanni Agnelli, the founder of FIAT, drank Punt e Mes with his meals.

The other names in the range are Carpano Classico, Carpano Bianco, Carpano Antica Formula and, more recently, Carpano Dry and a Carpano Botanic Bitter. The company says Antica Formula follows the recipe of 1786 and is known for its vanilla notes; it says the wormwood comes from the Alps of Piedmont and the Aosta Valley, and that only three people share the full recipe, among them Niccolò Branca, the head of the owning company.

Carpano is also a story of advertising. The company says that after the Second World War its owner commissioned campaigns from poster artists including Achille Mauzan and Marcello Dudovich and, later, Armando Testa, and that it sponsored Fausto Coppi’s cycling team; Italian Wikipedia lists a Carpano cycling team active from 1956 to 1964. The firm’s most famous mark is Testa’s: Italian Wikipedia says that in 1960 he designed the Punt e Mes logo, a hemisphere resting on its curve with a sphere of the same diameter floating just above it, both in dark red. In 2015 the Testa family gave the city of Turin Sintesi 59, a sculpture of that logo now in Piazza XVIII Dicembre, the Corriere della Sera reported on 28 October 2015.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are aperitif, vermouth and liqueur names: Lillet, Suze, Dubonnet, Noilly Prat, Carpano, Cocchi and Licor Beirão. Aperitif, vermouth and liqueur brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a cocktail bar.

An aperitif, vermouth or liqueur brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where it is actually made and bottled.

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

From the Carpano family to Turati, and then to Milan.

The business left the family in the twentieth century. The company says that in 1939 it was sold to Silvio Turati, an industrialist from Turin, who kept the old shop’s character and, after the war, drove the advertising and international sales, and that in 1978 the company bought the Caffè Sport Borghetti brand. In 2001 the Milan distiller Fratelli Branca Distillerie, founded in 1845 and the maker of Fernet-Branca, acquired Carpano; English Wikipedia dates the purchase of the rights to Punt e Mes from the Carpano family of Turin to that year, citing Chianti Classico Magazine in 2005, and VinePair gave the same year in 2025. English Wikipedia says Branca is controlled by the Branca family through a holding company, with Niccolò Branca as president and chief executive.

Today the Branca-run brand site lists the company’s offices and production facility in Milan, so a vermouth whose name is tied to Turin is now made in Lombardy. The motto the owner quotes on the Carpano site is Branca’s own, Novare Serbando, roughly “renew while preserving.” Whether Carpano invented vermouth is a matter of wording: the brand and English Wikipedia say so, while Italian Wikipedia says he was one of the first. There is more on the lettering in our note on the Carpano font.

For a design guide, Carpano shows how a Turin shop name, a dated legend and a single abstract mark — two red spheres by Armando Testa — can carry a vermouth through more than two centuries and three owners. Compare Fernet-Branca, its Milan stablemate with the eagle over the globe, and Cinzano, another Turin vermouth house. For this guide we use Punt e Mes red, vermouth amber and cellar black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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