Two brothers, a licence and a shop on Via Dora Grossa.

Cinzano dates its history to 1757 and to two brothers, Carlo Stefano and Giovanni Giacomo Cinzano. Italian Wikipedia, citing Ernesto Caballo’s history of the firm, says that on 6 January 1757 the brothers were admitted as master distillers in Turin and opened a shop-workshop on Via Dora Grossa, today Via Garibaldi, in the centre of the city. The company’s own history, as published on cinzano.com in 2019, puts it the same way: the brothers joined the city’s guild of master distillers and confectioners, Carlo Stefano running a confectionery trade in town and Giovanni Giacomo growing fruit and vines on the family land in the hills of Pecetto, outside Turin.

English Wikipedia, drawing on a 2004 Campari press kit, describes the shop as a herbal shop where the brothers created a red vermouth, the “vermouth of Turin,” from Alpine aromatic plants; a white Cinzano Bianco and an Extra Dry followed. The company says it was supplying the Savoy royal court by 1776, and that in the mid-1800s the court asked it to work on sparkling wine at Santa Vittoria d’Alba, in the province of Cuneo, which became the centre of the business.

The firm grew into an industrial producer in the second half of the nineteenth century. Italian Wikipedia says large-scale production began from the 1860s, with a first plant at Santo Stefano Belbo. The company says Enrico Cinzano founded Francesco Cinzano & Compagnia in 1868, setting confectionery aside to concentrate on vermouth — the name Italian Wikipedia still gives for the business today. Exports began in the 1890s, to markets including Argentina, Brazil and the United States, according to the Campari press kit cited by English Wikipedia. In 1924 Cinzano bought the Sicilian wine house Florio, and in the 1930s the Agnelli family took half of the capital, Italian Wikipedia says, while the Marone Cinzano family stayed in the management.

Printed labels, posters and a neon roof.

Cinzano’s visual story is mostly told by the company, and it starts with the label. The company says that at the Turin exhibition of 1884 Enrico Cinzano decided to improve the packaging: handwritten labels were replaced by printed ones that showed the brand’s awards and royal appointments on the bottle. From 1898, it says, Enrico and his brother Emiliano used posters, postcards and advertisements in the press of the Belle Époque, working with illustrators of the day.

One of those illustrators is well documented. Leonetto Cappiello, the Italian-born poster artist who worked in Paris, drew a Cinzano poster dated 1910; French Wikipedia lists it among his best-known posters, and Italian Wikipedia lists a “Vermouth Cinzano” of the same year. English Wikipedia’s gallery of his lithographs includes an Asti Cinzano poster from that year.

Cinzano was also early to light. In Paris in 1913, Christoph Ribbat writes in Flickering Light: A History of Neon (Reaktion Books, 2013), Cinzano was the first product to be advertised with a neon sign on a roof.

The mark itself is described by the company. It says a new red and blue logo was introduced in 1925: red standing for passion, pride and splendour, blue for nobility, tradition and the depth of the Mediterranean, the two colours together for Italian identity, and the rising diagonal line that divides them for the company’s path and growth.

Later advertising moved to the screen. The company says it made more than 230 television commercials between 1957 and 1980. In Britain, Cinzano was known for comic television advertisements with Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins, in one of which Rossiter tips a glass over Collins on a plane, The Daily Telegraph recalled in 2016. The brand also turns up on screen in fiction: a Cinzano cycling team plays a central part in the film Breaking Away, and the name appears as a client brand in Mad Men, English Wikipedia notes. For the 250th anniversary in 2007 the company says it worked with artists including Ugo Nespolo and Eduard Erlikh on campaigns and limited-edition bottles, and in 2014 it introduced a Casa Cinzano 1757 vermouth line.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all liqueur and aperitif brands: Baileys, Kahlúa, Disaronno, Martini, Cinzano, Molinari and Becherovka. Liqueur and aperitif brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a hotel bar.

A liqueur or aperitif brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a bottle, a label, a name and the drink or occasion 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 its drinks are 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 bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Family house, multinational brand, Piedmont again.

Cinzano stopped being a family business in stages. In 1984 Ifint, the Agnelli holding company, agreed to sell a quarter of Cinzano International to International Distillers & Vintners, the drinks arm of Britain’s Grand Metropolitan, La Repubblica reported; the deal took effect in April 1985, and Luca Cordero di Montezemolo left as chief executive. In January 1992 Grand Metropolitan bought the founding family’s remaining half, La Repubblica reported, and the European Commission cleared its takeover of Cinzano International that year, noting a European vermouth share in the low single digits, far behind Martini.

Grand Metropolitan merged with Guinness to form Diageo in 1997. In September 1999 Diageo sold the Cinzano brand to Gruppo Campari, CNN Money reported; Italian Wikipedia, citing WineNews, says the sale covered the mark but not the historic plant at Santa Vittoria d’Alba, which stayed with Diageo.

Campari kept Cinzano for a quarter of a century. In June 2025 it agreed to sell the Cinzano vermouth and sparkling-wine brand, together with the Frattina grappa and sparkling-wine business, to Caffo Group 1915, the privately held Calabrian company behind Vecchio Amaro del Capo, The Spirits Business reported. The sale covered intellectual property, finished stock, certain employees and some production equipment in Italy, but not Campari’s plants in Italy and Argentina; a transitional agreement had Campari manufacturing for Caffo in those countries and distributing the brand for a time in markets including Spain, Mexico and South Africa. In October 2025 FoodBev reported that Italian Wine Brands had signed a binding offer to sell Caffo its site at Valle Talloria, in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont, to become the home of Cinzano’s production and historical archive, if the deal was finalised. Caffo says Cinzano is distributed in more than 100 countries.

The range today centres on Cinzano Rosso, Bianco, Extra Dry and Rosé vermouths, with the 1757 Vermouth di Torino line, Asti, Prosecco and other sparkling wines, Italian Wikipedia lists. Our separate guide asks what font Cinzano uses.

For a design guide, Cinzano shows how a two-colour mark and a poster tradition can carry a name through four owners. Compare Martini, the vermouth the European Commission found far ahead of Cinzano in 1992, and Molinari, another Italian liqueur name. For this guide we use a deep blue, a vermouth red and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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