A distiller from Trentino, an inn and a wooden bridge.

Nardini’s story begins in 1779 at the end of a bridge. English Wikipedia, citing Ove Boudin’s 2012 book Grappa: Italy Bottled, says that in April of that year Bortolo Nardini bought an inn at the eastern entrance of the wooden covered bridge over the Brenta in Bassano del Grappa, in the Veneto, and that the inn became the Grapperia Nardini. The site gave him water for distilling and a route to the markets of Venice, the same article says.

The company tells the story in more detail. It says Bortolo Nardini came from Segonzano, in the Cembra Valley of Trentino, that the inn he bought was called the Osteria al Ponte, and that he installed a permanent still there and called his spirit “Aquavite di Vinaccia,” a pomace brandy. The bridge itself is older than the business: Roads & Kingdoms wrote in 2018 that it was first designed by Andrea Palladio in 1569 and has been rebuilt many times since. It is also known as the Ponte Vecchio and as the bridge of the Alpini, and the company describes its grappa as “created in 1779 on Ponte Vecchio in Bassano.”

The grapperia is still open. English Wikipedia says it has been kept in its original state and is listed by the Associazione Locali Storici d’Italia, the association of historic Italian venues, and the company’s own page on its places says the same. The company calls Nardini “the oldest distillery in Italy,” a claim it makes for itself, and its products page calls Nardini the “First Grappa of Italy.”

Steam, two distilleries and seven generations.

The business has stayed with the family. Life & Thyme reported in October 2017 that Nardini had been family-owned and run for seven generations, and the company says the seventh generation runs it today. English Wikipedia names Giuseppe, Cristina, Angelo, Antonio and Leonardo Nardini as the people managing the company, and says the firm is a member of Les Hénokiens, an international association of family companies that are at least two hundred years old; the company says the same about its membership.

The company’s own timeline sets out how its methods changed. It says the family introduced a steam still in 1860, so that the pomace was heated without burning; that a Riserva grappa aged in oak casks followed in 1910, when a new generation, Bortolo, Orazio and Mario, took over; that double rectification came in 1919, after the First World War; and that vacuum steam distillation arrived in 1963. For the 240th anniversary in 2019 it released a single-cask Riserva aged twenty-two years, the company says.

Distilling no longer happens at the bridge. Life & Thyme noted that production had moved off site from the bar, to grounds about a ten-minute drive away. The company lists two production sites: a distillery at the edge of Bassano, with batch stills and an analysis laboratory, and a second distillery at Monastier di Treviso, which it says uses both batch bain-marie stills and continuous columns. It sells its spirits in a few families: Nardini Grappa, the Selezione Bortolo Nardini grappas, the aperitifs Rabarbaro and Mezzoemezzo, and liqueurs including Tagliatella and Acqua di Cedro.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mezcal, baijiu and grappa names: Del Maguey, Montelobos, 400 Conejos, Luzhou Laojiao, Fenjiu, Yanghe and Nardini. Spirits 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 bar list.

A spirits 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 its spirit 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 spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two glass bubbles over water, and a drink that rarely leaves town.

Nardini’s best-known piece of design is a building. For its 225th anniversary in 2004, the family unveiled the Bolle, Italian for “bubbles,” two glass volumes raised over a pool of water on the distillery grounds. English Wikipedia and the company credit the architect Massimiliano Fuksas; the German architecture site Baunetz Wissen and the design magazine IFDM (2016) credit Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas. English Wikipedia says the work was commissioned three years before it was unveiled.

Baunetz Wissen describes two elliptical volumes, about twenty and twenty-five metres long, lifted above a water basin and clad in some 1,200 square metres of double-curved glass in 408 panes, with structural engineering by Gilberto Sarti; it names Giuseppe and Cristina Nardini as the clients. Inside are a research laboratory, tasting rooms, a media hall and a foyer. The company says the Bolle stand in a park laid out in the early 1980s by the landscape architect Pietro Porcinai, and that the building is used for research, events and tours.

Back at the bridge, the house drink is the mezzo e mezzo. Roads & Kingdoms described it in January 2018 as one part Nardini rabarbaro, one part rosso and two parts cold soda water with a twist of lemon, served in a small tumbler, and said it is rarely found outside Bassano. The company now bottles a ready-mixed version as Mezzoemezzo. Our separate guide looks at the Nardini lettering.

For a design guide, Nardini shows how a single place — an inn at the end of a famous bridge — can carry a drinks brand for more than two centuries, with a modern building added beside it rather than in its place. Compare Amaro Montenegro and Strega, two other long-established Italian spirits houses. For this guide we use Brenta green, rhubarb red and bridge timber with a heritage serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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