Orazio Nonino, a village near Udine and six generations of distillers.

Nonino is a grappa distillery in Friuli, the north-eastern corner of Italy, and it is still run by the family that gives it its name. Italian Wikipedia says the first Nonino distillery was founded by Orazio Nonino at Ronchi di Percoto, in the province of Udine, in 1897. The company says that before 1897 the still had travelled from farm to farm on wheels, and that Orazio gave it a fixed home that year.

The company’s own timeline follows the business through the generations: Orazio was followed by Luigi, then by Antonio, then by Benito Nonino, a great-grandson of the founder, as Italian Wikipedia describes him. The company says the distillery moved from Ronchi to Percoto itself in 1928, the year Antonio married Silvia Milocco, and that Silvia ran the distillery after she was widowed in 1940 — the company calls her the first woman in Italy to head a distillery.

The same timeline places the first Nonino liqueurs in 1933, when Antonio began making an herbal amaro on a base of his own grappa. That year also gave the brand its oldest piece of graphic identity. A royal decree of November 1933 required grappa to be sold in bottles with a proper label and a state seal, and the company says Antonio answered it with a label showing the fogolâr furlan, the great open hearth at the centre of the old Friulian farmhouse, where families gathered to work, talk and drink.

Benito married Giannola Bulfoni in 1962, the company says, and the couple set out to change how grappa was made and presented. Their three daughters, Cristina, Antonella and Elisabetta, now run the company, Italian Wikipedia says, and a sixth generation, Francesca Bardelli Nonino, works on its digital channels and foreign markets.

A single grape, a ministerial decree and a glass bottle from Murano.

The date the family treats as its turning point is 1 December 1973. That day, the company says, Benito and Giannola distilled the pomace of the Picolit grape on its own, creating the first Nonino Monovitigno, a grappa from a single grape variety. Italian Wikipedia records the same step, and Italian national obituaries of Benito Nonino in July 2024, among them LaPresse and Sky TG24, credited the Picolit grappa with changing how grappa itself was seen. The company says a second distillation of Picolit and a first of Ribolla followed in December 1974, and that most Italian and foreign distillers later followed the single-variety model.

A second invention followed in 1984. Italian Wikipedia says Benito and Giannola created an acquavite d’uva, a spirit distilled in one pass from the whole grape — skin, pulp and juice — rather than from pomace alone. The company sells it as ÙE and says a ministerial decree of October 1984 authorising grape spirit was issued at its request.

Packaging became part of the story at the same moment. The company says that in December 1984 it asked Venini, the Murano glassworks, to hand-blow a bottle for the first ÙE Picolit with a murrina — a glass cane slice — showing a bunch of grapes set into the glass, and that later vintages of what it calls the Collezione Nonino were bottled in hand-made glass from Venini, Baccarat and Riedel. The company also says the Collezione entered the permanent collection of the Triennale Design Museum in Milan in November 2010. The cartoonist Altan illustrated a family monograph in 1987 and drew a comic-book history of the family for the distillery’s centenary in 1997, the company says.

The family’s amaro was reworked in 1992. The company says the three sisters replaced grappa in the old family recipe with ÙE aged in barriques and small casks, and named the result Amaro Nonino Quintessentia. A honey spirit, Gioiello, followed in 2000.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all brandy and grappa houses: Camus, Hine, Delamain, Otard, Père Magloire, Christian Drouin and Nonino. Brandy and grappa houses in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms 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 village shop to a hotel bar.

A brandy or grappa house’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 distilled, aged 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.

A prize for farm culture that grew into a literary award.

Outside the distillery, the Nonino name is best known for a prize. In 1975, the company says, the family set up the Premio Nonino Risit d’Aur to reward growers who replanted old Friulian vines such as Schioppettino, Pignolo and Tazzelenghe, which were then not authorised for cultivation; the company says a ministerial decree authorised them in 1977. Italian Wikipedia dates the prize to 1975 and says it grew into an international literary award dedicated to rural culture. Its list of winners includes V. S. Naipaul in 1993, Tomas Tranströmer in 2004 and Mo Yan in 2005, each of whom later received the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1986 and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in 2009. The prize was not awarded in 2020, 2021 or 2023, Italian Wikipedia says; Michael Krüger received it in 2025.

Benito Nonino died at Percoto in July 2024, LaPresse and Sky TG24 reported on 8 July 2024; Il Foglio followed on 9 July with a piece calling the family business a “matriarchal miracle.” Italian Wikipedia says that by the end of 2023 the sisters had announced plans to expand into Mexico, and that the fiftieth anniversary of the Monovitigno had been celebrated at the IBA World Cocktail Championship in Rome. Nonino is family-owned. The company says it distils in batch steam stills, and that in 2004 it re-established a set of artisanal stills at Ronchi di Percoto, where Orazio began.

The site has also looked at the font Nonino uses. Searchers should note that Nonino is also an Italian surname, so the brand’s own site is grappanonino.it.

For a design guide, Nonino shows how a family distillery can build an identity from a hearth on a label, a single grape named on the bottle, glass made in Murano and a prize that carries the family name far beyond the drinks shelf. Compare Strega, the Benevento liqueur behind a literary prize, and Averna, the Sicilian amaro. For this guide we use hearth copper, Picolit gold and pomace cream with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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