Why it matters
The producer
Giancarlo Mancino grew up in Pignola, a hill village in Basilicata in southern Italy, and spent his working life inside bars and restaurants before he went looking for something to make rather than pour. He found it in Asti, Piedmont, where a family-run distillery established in 1957 was still operating with its original equipment. Mancino did not build a new production facility. He composed his vermouth around the equipment already there.
The brand presented its first range at Bar Convent Berlin in 2012 and was an immediate success. Mancino sells predominantly abroad, a commercial decision Giancarlo made himself. Production is entirely Italian, and the bottles sit within the Vermouth di Torino appellation, formalised by Italy's Ministry of Agricultural Policy in 2017 with rules requiring Piedmont white wines, predominantly Italian botanicals and a minimum bottling strength of 16% ABV.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Asti is a city in southern Piedmont, better known in wine terms for Moscato d'Asti and Barbera d'Asti than for vermouth production. But Piedmont is the canonical home of Turin-style vermouth, and the 2017 Vermouth di Torino appellation formalised what the region had been producing since the eighteenth century. Under the appellation rules, the base wine must come from Piedmont and the botanical blend must be predominantly Italian.
Mancino's base wine is not Piedmontese. The core range uses Trebbiano di Romagna IGP, a neutral, high-acid white from Emilia-Romagna, chosen because its clean profile does not compete with the botanical extracts. The Chinato breaks from that and uses Barbera d'Asti, a red grape grown locally in Asti, whose darker fruit and firmer acidity carry the quinine bitterness of chinato production differently from a white base. The production facility is in Asti; the base wine comes from further east. Both choices are deliberate.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
Every botanical in the Mancino range is crushed in the 1930 mill at the Asti facility. After crushing, each botanical is extracted separately in a hydroalcoholic solution for up to 30 days. The long, individual extraction pulls out aromatic compounds more precisely than a combined maceration, and the separate timing means herbs that need two weeks and resins that need four weeks are not pushed or held back to fit a single schedule.
The extracts are blended with Trebbiano di Romagna IGP, caster sugar and a sugar-beet neutral spirit at 30% ABV. After cooling, the liquid filters through linen fibres for approximately one week. Linen filtration is slower and finer than most commercial filter media; it leaves a clear liquid without sediment and without the abruptness of tight mechanical filtration. Following that, the vermouth rests in stainless-steel tanks for six months before bottling.
Wines to know
The range in view
The Mancino range runs from dry and pale to barrel-aged and bitter, with the base wine choice doing as much work as the botanical selection.
Secco is the dry white expression, built on Trebbiano di Romagna IGP with about forty botanicals. Tasting notes place it at the austere end of the vermouth spectrum: dried herbs, citrus peel, a clean and narrow finish. It does not lean sweet.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
Start with the Rosso Amaranto. It is the vermouth Mancino is most reviewed and most consistently described, and it demonstrates what the long botanical extraction and the six-month tank rest actually do. Dried fruit and bitter orange arrive first, then cinnamon and a slow herbal bitterness that builds and holds rather than cutting off. The Trebbiano base keeps the acidity present, so the sweetness never becomes heavy. There is no oak, no oxidation, no wood. Drink it over ice with a strip of orange peel, or mix it into a Negroni in place of a house vermouth and it will change the drink noticeably.