Aromatised wines and a chain of tasting bars.

Cocchi was founded in Asti, in Piedmont, in 1891. English Wikipedia describes Giulio Cocchi Spumanti as a winery based in Asti since that year and its founder, Giulio Cocchi, as a pastry chef from Tuscany who moved his business to Asti in the late nineteenth century, drawn by the town’s food and wine and by Moscato, and who began making aromatised and sparkling wines. The drinks writer Camper English, visiting in 2019 for his site Alcademics, gave the same founding year and town and said Cocchi made still, sparkling and aromatised wines.

The company fills in the rest. It says Giulio Cocchi was a young pastry chef from Florence, that he opened his distillery in 1891 beside the medieval Baptistery of San Pietro in Asti, and that his Barolo Chinato, his Aperitivo Americano and several vermouths soon became well known. English Wikipedia, citing a 2013 trade tasting note, says that by the turn of the century his Barolo Chinato and Americano were selling in Piedmont, London, New York, Africa and South America.

Cocchi grew through bars as much as bottles. The company says Giulio set up authorised tasting bars, seven in Piedmont by 1913 and later twelve, and that the Bar Cocchi on Piazza Alfieri, the main square in Asti, is still open. It says his son Federico Cocchi led the expansion abroad, opening a Bar Cocchi in Asmara in 1935, founding a Casa Cocchi in Caracas and shipping to New York in the 1950s, and that the company also took out patents for machinery and ran its own citrus-processing plant.

An Americano, a chinato and a Torino vermouth.

The house’s signature is Cocchi Americano, a quinine-flavoured aperitif wine. English Wikipedia dates it to 1891 and says it is made by Giulio Cocchi Spumanti in the province of Asti, with a pink version, Americano Rosa. The company says the name comes both from the alcohol being made bitter, amaricato, with herbs and spices, and from the American habit of drinking vermouth with ice and soda, and lists gentian, wormwood, cinchona bark, bitter orange peel and elderflower among its botanicals.

The Americano reached a new audience through cocktails. English Wikipedia says it became better known as a stand-in for the original Kina Lillet in James Bond’s Vesper martini, citing The Telegraph in 2015, and is often treated as the nearest modern drink to it; the New York Times T Magazine wrote about it in the Corpse Reviver No. 2 in April 2010. The company says it is also served long with soda, as a spritz, or with Alta Langa sparkling wine as an Americano Royale.

The rest of the range follows the founder’s line of wine-based drinks. The company says it has worked to save Barolo Chinato, one of the founder’s first successes, from being forgotten. Storico Vermouth di Torino, a sweet amber vermouth that the company says follows Giulio Cocchi’s original recipe, has been sold since 2011; the Los Angeles Times covered its arrival in September 2011 as a 120-year-old recipe making a comeback, and English Wikipedia says it won Best Sweet Vermouth at the 2014 Bartender’s Best Awards. The house also makes Asti and Brachetto d’Acqui, traditional-method sparkling wines from the Alta Langa DOCG and grappa, and the company says all its products are wine-based.

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 Cocchi family to the Bavas.

Ownership changed once. The company says Federico Cocchi’s daughter, Adria, handed the business to Piero Bava in the 1970s, and that Cocchi has been owned and run by the Bava family, wine producers in Monferrato and the Langhe, since 1978; Alcademics also gave 1978 in 2019. The company names Piero Bava’s sons Roberto, Giulio and Paolo among the family members running it today. Alcademics described Roberto Bava as president of the Vermouth di Torino Institute and part of the group of producers that won legal recognition for the Vermouth di Torino geographical indication in 2017, which requires the drink to be made and bottled in Piedmont.

The house’s standing is on record. English Wikipedia says Giulio Cocchi Spumanti is listed on Italy’s national register of historic companies, and La Stampa in 2012 included it among businesses that served the economy of Asti; the company says it entered the register in 2012. The label carries a visual signature too: the company says the Cocchi Americano label still bears an original futurist rooster drawn in the 1930s, a sign of the aperitif’s role in waking the appetite and also a symbol of the town of Asti. The company also lists a gold medal for design for Storico Vermouth di Torino at the 2018 Bartenders Brand Awards. There is more on the lettering in our note on the Cocchi font.

For a design guide, Cocchi shows how a single town, a rooster from the futurist years and a small set of wine-based recipes can carry a family house from a bar in Asti to cocktail menus abroad. Compare Lillet, the Bordeaux aperitif whose old Kina recipe the Americano is so often asked to stand in for, and Martini, the Turin vermouth of the ball and bar. For this guide we use Americano gold, rooster red and Asti ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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