A sister’s idea, a brother’s motorcycle and a family name asked for at the bar.

Marzadro is a family grappa distillery in Nogaredo, in the Vallagarina valley of Trentino near Rovereto. Its story begins with a woman. The company says Sabina Marzadro spent twelve years in service in the household of a deputy in Rome before returning home to Brancolino, a hamlet of Nogaredo, where her brother Attilio was still farming. Back in the old family house, the company says, she had a small direct-fire still made by Arnoldi, a well-known local coppersmith, and in 1949 the first carts of grape pomace began arriving in the courtyard. English Wikipedia also dates the founding to 1949 and names Sabina and Attilio as the founders.

The division of labour was simple. Sabina distilled; Attilio sold. The company says he loaded bottles into the sidecar of a Moto Guzzi and rode them to Rovereto and the surrounding villages, and that at the bar people began to ask for “una Marzadro,” a glass called by the family’s surname. Sabina also went up into the mountains to gather wild herbs, roots and berries to steep in grappa — woodruff, mountain pine, nettle, juniper and rue — and kept her notes in a notebook that later passed to her brother.

In 1960, the company and the Trento daily L’Adige (2023) both say, Sabina left the running of the distillery to Attilio. He and his wife Teresa had six children, and the company says Stefano, Erino, Andrea and Elena began helping in the business, joined later by Anna and Fabiola. In 1964, according to the company, a new distillery was built a few steps from the house, with an office, a weighbridge for the pomace carts, a row of stills, a bottling room and a small shop. Speaking to L’Adige in November 2023, Stefano Marzadro credited the business to “the constancy and commitment of a woman, Aunt Sabina.”

Copper, a glass dome and a roof of green.

The single-varietal turn came early. The company says that in 1975 it launched a grappa distilled only from Marzemino pomace, a red grape of Trentino, from nearby Isera. At the end of the 1970s, it says, the direct-fire still gave way to copper bain-marie stills, in which the boiler sits in heated water so the pomace warms more gradually. The handover to the second generation is dated differently by different sources: English Wikipedia gives 1978, while the company and L’Adige say Attilio passed full responsibility to his children in the early 1980s.

The company’s answer to a slump in grappa’s fortunes in the 1980s was a liqueur. It says the brothers created a grappa liqueur with Trentino blueberries picked at Baselga di Piné, at about 1,000 metres, and pushed by hand one by one into the necks of the bottles. In the 1990s, the company says, it expanded into Rovereto for warehouses, offices and bottling, and enlarged an in-house “artistic workshop” where painters decorated bottles by hand with designs and dedications. English Wikipedia likewise mentions hand-decorated souvenir bottles from the 1980s onward.

The signature grappa arrived in 2002, the company says: Le Diciotto Lune, “the eighteen moons,” a stravecchia aged for at least eighteen months in small casks of different woods. English Wikipedia lists the woods of an eighteen-month grappa as oak, acacia, ash and cherry, though it dates that launch to 1999. The company’s home page promotes it alongside a terracotta-aged Anfora grappa; L’Adige reported that the company has refined a grappa in 300-litre terracotta containers since 2015.

Then came a new home. In 2004, the company says, part of Attilio’s vineyard in Nogaredo, about a kilometre from Brancolino, became a new distillery, and the stills, cask cellar, offices, warehouse and bottling line moved there. The company says it commissioned the Bolzano architects Walter Maurmayr and Günther Plaickner, who worked to an idea of “contemporary craftsmanship”: three buildings in stone, wood and glass, oriented to the sun, with a planted green roof, and a glass-and-metal dome over a circular room of eight copper bain-marie stills that the company calls “a forest of copper.” English Wikipedia also credits the 2004 building to Plaickner and Maurmayr; L’Adige dated the move to 2005.

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.

Still a family business, now with oil and wine.

Marzadro remains in the family. L’Adige reported in November 2023 that the distillery is in its third generation, with Stefano Marzadro speaking for production and exports, Andrea Marzadro leading tastings and Anna Marzadro running the olive mill at Linfano near Arco. The same report said most sales are in Italy, with about a fifth of turnover from exports, led by Germany and then Switzerland, across some twenty countries including South Africa and Japan.

The family has also moved beyond grappa. L’Adige reported that the company acquired the Madonna delle Vittorie estate on Lake Garda, adding olive oil, wine, a restaurant and farm stay, and that the family also keeps cattle in Val Rendena; the distillery’s own site links to Madonna delle Vittorie as “our winery and oil mill.” Visitors are part of the plan: the company says the Nogaredo building was designed to receive guests from across Europe, and L’Adige described tourist coaches arriving through the year.

For a design guide, Marzadro shows how a family grappa house can let its building and its copper do the brand work: a glass dome over a ring of stills, a stravecchia named for eighteen moons of ageing, and a surname that once stood in for the drink itself. Compare Nonino, the Friulian family distillery, and Nardini, the grappa house on the bridge at Bassano del Grappa. For this guide we use still copper, cask brown and vineyard green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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