Bortolo Nardini (Ditta Bortolo Nardini Spa) | The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails

, to give it its full corporate name) is Italy’s first grappa house, founded in 1779 on the banks of the Brenta River in Bassano in the northern Veneto region. Bortolo Nardini (1739–1812) was previously a distiller in his home town of Segonzano, in Trentino. Passing through Bassano on business, he was taken with the town and decided to settle there, purchasing the Osteria del Ponte beneath the town’s central bridge. There he created and sold an acquavite di vinaccia, or pomace spirit—what is today known as grappa. See grappa. While grappa had been made in Italy previously, Nardini was the first to regularize its production and market it as a quality spirit, rather than as a poor farmer’s attempt to squeeze every drop of alcohol from his harvest. The primacy of his effort is reflected in the town’s name: it is now called Bassano del Grappa.

The Nardini family continued to help grappa to innovate, adopting steam (indirect) distillation in 1860, introducing double distillation in 1915, and by the 1960s implementing vacuum distillation in order to improve the character of this once rustic spirit. In the postwar years, the firm was also a pioneer in barrel-aging grappas. It built a new distillery just outside of town in 1964 (now adorned with a pair of futuristic giant blue glass bubble pods that hold a laboratory and a meeting room), and in 1991 it acquired and modernized the Monastier distillery in Treviso, with six times the capacity of the Bassano one. Today the seventh generation of the family continues to own and run the company, which makes a number of amari, liqueurs, and other spirits, although 95 percent of its production continues to be grappa, most of it unaged.