Vermouth di Torino
Vermouth di Torino is a wine aromatized with herbs and spices, born in the workshops of Turin's liquor-makers in the eighteenth century and today protected by a geographical indication recognized by the Ministry of Agricultural Policies through decree no. 1826 of 22 March 2017[1]. The name comes from the German Wermuth, meaning wormwood, and the old spelling wavered between Vermouth, Wermouth and Wermuth[2]. For Turin it is both the ritual of the aperitif and an industry that was already exporting to Europe and the Americas by the mid-nineteenth century.
From wormwood wine to the pharmacopoeia
A wine with wormwood, the vinum absinthites, was already used as a remedy in the early centuries after Christ; with the addition of Eastern spices during the Renaissance, the recipe was enriched with cinnamon, cloves and rhubarb[3]. From the mid-fifteenth century, Piedmont developed its own expertise in distillation, and in 1736 the pharmaceutical codex Pharmacopoea Taurinensis described the "Vinum Absinthites". Turin's liquor-makers were enrolled in the city's Università dei Confettieri e Liquoristi, to which the consortium attributes the new aromatized wine recipes and the first bottled vermouths[3]. According to Slow Food, vermouth was born in eighteenth-century Turin thanks to the House of Savoy, which, being related to the ruling house of Vienna, engaged in gastronomic exchanges with it[4].
Carpano's workshop
The founding date is 1786. According to the Carpano house, that year Antonio Benedetto Carpano, after training as an herbalist, perfected in Turin a formula based on moscato wine, herbs and spices, in a shop facing the Palazzo Reale; the product is said to have pleased King Vittorio Amedeo III[5]. In 1937 the Enciclopedia Italiana acknowledged Carpano's primacy:
"The fact remains, however, that its fame was born in Piedmont, thanks to Antonio Benedetto Carpano, who was the first to produce it and 'launch' it in Turin in 1786."
Dalmasso's entry also recalls that the original vermut was made with white moscato from Canelli[2], and the Treccani dates industrial-scale production precisely to 1786[6]. In 1820 his nephew Giuseppe Bernardino Carpano turned the business into a structured enterprise, founding the "Fabbrica di Liquori e Vermouth" under the arcades of Piazza Castello at number 21. Among its patrons the house lists Cavour, Massimo d'Azeglio, Urbano Rattazzi, Giuseppe Verdi and Giuseppe Giacosa. At the end of the nineteenth century the brothers Luigi and Ottavio turned the workshop into a full factory; in 1939 ownership passed to Silvio Turati and in 2001 to Fratelli Branca, which moved production to Milan[5].
From the same workshop comes Punt e Mes. On 19 April 1870, as Carpano tells it, a stockbroker discussing shares that had risen "by a point and a half" ordered his usual vermouth corrected with half a dose of china, using the dialect expression that gave the drink its name. Regulars would later order it with a gesture, thumb raised and hand held flat horizontally; it was also drunk by Giovanni Agnelli, the founder of FIAT, as recalled in an account of his from 1916[7].
The nineteenth century: from the city to the world
In 1833 the first advertisement for the Turin product appears, presenting it as "true balsamic wine called Vermut di Torino"[3]; according to Slow Food, the Giornale di Milano wrote about it that same year[4]. By the mid-nineteenth century the city had 42 spirits sellers and 30 liquor producers, and vermouth was being shipped to France, Spain, Latin America and the United States, where it entered cocktail culture[3]. Meanwhile the houses that would turn it into an industry were emerging: Cinzano, founded in Turin in 1757 by the brothers Giovanni Giacomo and Carlo Stefano Cinzano, announced in 2026, under the Gruppo Caffo 1915, the return of production to Piedmont, in Diano d'Alba[8]; Giulio Cocchi opened in Asti in 1891[9], and today the consortium also includes Martini & Rossi, Gancia and Mancino[1]. In 1937 the main plants were located in the provinces of Cuneo, Asti and Turin; growing demand had led to replacing moscato with cheaper white wines from Romagna, Puglia, Sardinia and Sicily, and the royal decree-law of 9 November 1933 had set, for the standard type, a minimum of 15.5% alcohol and 13% sugar[2].
Even the colors have their own chronology. According to Slow Food, white vermouth was born in 1894, while dry vermouth arrived in 1915[4]; the consortium instead dates the white, with its floral and citrus notes and appreciated by women in bars—nicknamed "Delizia per signore"—to 1900, and the red, colored with caramel for the American market, to the 1920s[3].
The 2017 specification
The decree of 22 March 2017 recognizes the production specification "Vermut di Torino" / "Vermouth di Torino" and sets its production and commercial requirements[1]. The draft submitted by the Piedmont Region to the Ministry on 27 February 2017 envisaged an alcohol content between 16 and 22%; for the "Superiore" designation, at least 17% and at least half Piedmontese wine. The text cited moscato as the historically principal wine for the preparation, but did not mandate it. Commenting on that draft on Slowine, Michele Antonio Fino asked that at least the Superiore version be "a 100% Piedmontese vermouth", suggesting Cortese in place of Trebbiano from other regions[10].
The consortium and the herbs of Pancalieri
The Consorzio del Vermouth di Torino was established in 2019, after more than twenty years of work by producers, and brings together historic brands such as Carpano, Cinzano, Gancia and Cocchi[1]. In 2022 it represented 95% of production, with 27 producers and more than 50 labels[4]. The defining ingredient is Piedmontese wormwood: since 2018 it has been grown for the consortium by the Cooperativa Erbe Aromatiche di Pancalieri, founded in 1985 in a town where peppermint has been cultivated for about a century and a half[11]. The recipe, however, remains each house's own: "The artist is and will always remain the producer," said the consortium's vice president Stefano Berta, referring to the secret blend of spices that sets one label apart from another[4].