A port town, a sambuca maker and a recipe of his own.

Molinari began in Civitavecchia, the port north of Rome, in 1945. Its founder was Angelo Molinari. Italian Wikipedia, citing Alberto Mazzuca’s book I numeri uno del made in Italy (Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2005), says he worked in wine after serving in the First World War, ran a bar in Addis Ababa for a time, and on returning to Italy at the end of the 1930s was employed in Civitavecchia by a sambuca producer, Sambuca Manzi. In 1945 he set up on his own, making sambuca by hand to a formula based on star anise, and added the word “extra” to mark it as a premium product.

The town already had a claim on the drink. English Wikipedia, citing an older Molinari web page, says the word sambuca was first used for an elderberry liquor created in Civitavecchia around 1850 by Luigi Manzi. Today sambuca is defined in European Union spirits rules as an anise-flavoured liqueur, bottled at a minimum of 38 per cent alcohol by volume.

The company tells its own story in similar terms. Its website describes Angelo Molinari as a perfumer who began experimenting in Civitavecchia in 1945 to create Sambuca Extra, “a liqueur with an unmistakable taste, based on star anise,” to a recipe it says is still secret; the trade magazine Beverfood, in 2020, likewise called him an expert perfumer who knew the secrets of blending.

The drink’s fame grew in Rome. Italian Wikipedia, again citing Mazzuca, says it became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, the years of the “dolce vita,” when barmen on Via Veneto served it with a coffee bean — the origin, it says, of “sambuca con la mosca,” sambuca “with the fly.” The company says Angelo spread the brand there with his children Marcello and Mafalda, and that his son Antonio joined the business in 1967.

A first plant, a bigger one, and a family in charge.

Production moved from the workshop to industry within three decades. Italian Wikipedia says the first plant opened in 1959. A larger, highly automated plant followed at Colfelice, in the province of Frosinone, able to fill up to 60,000 bottles a day; the company dates its Molinari Sud S.p.A. plant there to 1974, while Italian Wikipedia says it became operational in 1975. The company’s website lists an administrative office in Civitavecchia and refers to its plants without naming them on its recipe page.

The business has stayed with the family. By 1975 Angelo’s children were running it, the company says, with Marcello and Mafalda at the head and Antonio handling foreign markets, according to Italian Wikipedia. In 2013, the Corriere della Sera’s business supplement reported in 2014, Antonio passed day-to-day control to his sons Mario and Angelo Molinari, who became joint chief executives, with his daughter Inge on the board. Beverfood names the company Molinari Italia S.p.A.

Italian Wikipedia puts output at about ten million bottles a year, a third of them sold in 80 countries. Over time the company has added other brands, some owned and some distributed: it lists Molinari Caffè, which the company says it revived in 2003 as a coffee version of the original recipe, the DICAPRI limoncello, of which it bought 51 per cent from the Canale family in 1999 and the rest in June 2017, the trade magazine Mark-up reported, and the VOV and Ceschia grappa names.

Advertising made the name familiar in Italy. Italian Wikipedia lists television and radio spots with actors and sports figures including Walter Chiari, Paolo Stoppa and Rina Morelli, Adriano Panatta, Mario Andretti and, more recently, José Mourinho. The company recalls slogans from the 1980s and 1990s — “Se giri il mondo Molinari è lì,” roughly “wherever you go in the world, Molinari is there” — and the infobox on Italian Wikipedia gives the line “Non si dice Sambuca, si dice Molinari”: you don’t say sambuca, you say Molinari.

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.

A bottle redrawn for the first time in 2017.

The bottle is the most documented part of Molinari’s design. The company says that in 2017 it decided, for the first time, to renew the design of its historic bottle. Beverfood reported in April 2017 that the new bottle carried the signature of the branding agency Robilant & Associati. It was slimmer, lighter and more transparent, which the magazine said was meant to help it stand beside international premium spirits. A new stylised “SM” logo was printed directly on the glass, replacing the single “S” used for the sambuca, and the founder’s signature appeared in relief on the glass. The label became smaller and was printed on a barrier paper made to withstand freezer temperatures; the closure became an aluminium cap with an internal pourer, and a capsule with a valve showed whether the bottle had been opened. The bottle was presented to the sales network at the Ara Pacis in Rome.

For the brand’s 75th anniversary in 2020, Molinari released a limited edition illustrated by Olimpia Zagnoli, who signs her work OZ. Beverfood described the illustrations as very colourful, ironic and minimalist.

Both the company’s history page and Beverfood’s 2020 report return to the same few facts: Civitavecchia, 1945, Angelo Molinari and star anise.

For a design guide, Molinari shows how a family name, a port town and a founding date can do the work of a whole identity, with a bottle the company says it redesigned for the first time only in 2017. Compare Disaronno, another Italian liqueur name, and Cinzano, the Turin vermouth house. For this guide we use clear-glass grey, anise green and a gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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