Why it matters
The producer
Martini & Rossi is a Piedmont producer. Not Veneto, despite occasional mislabelling in trade directories: the company was founded in Turin in July 1863, its production plant has operated at Pessione ever since, and its registered corporate address remains Pessione-Chieri, province of Turin. That geography matters because it places Martini inside the same regional tradition that produced Italian vermouth as a category.
The three founders each brought something concrete. Alessandro Martini supplied commercial ambition and a name. Teofilo Sola brought capital and organisation. Luigi Rossi was an herbalist and liquorist, and he created the recipe for Martini Rosso. Within months of the founding, the company moved its manufacturing to Pessione, a small hamlet connected by rail to both Turin and the port at Genoa. That connection was not incidental: it was the distribution network, and Pessione was chosen partly because of it.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Pessione sits in the hills south-east of Turin, in a part of Piedmont where the landscape opens toward the Po plain. It is not wine country in the sense of named vineyard appellations; its significance to Martini is logistical and historical. The plant that opened there in 1864 still operates. The railways that once moved finished vermouth toward Genoa's port and then to export markets shaped the company's early expansion, and the Buenos Aires subsidiary that opened in 1883 was a direct product of that infrastructure.
The Pessione plant is a blending, botanical, and bottling facility rather than an estate winery. The relevant site details are botanical rather than geological: the herbs, roots, flowers, and spices that differentiate Martini Rosso from Martini Bianco come from multiple countries and are selected through a combination of sensory evaluation and chemical testing at Pessione.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
The production process at Pessione is botanical blending rather than vineyard farming. The Martini range begins with base wines that are sourced rather than estate-grown, and those wines are then aromatised with herb, root, flower, and spice combinations that vary by bottling. Martini Rosso uses a recipe of botanicals, herbs, and spices with bitter herbal character, warm spice, and a red-amber colour. Martini Bianco uses a different botanical selection weighted toward floral and sweet notes, giving a pale amber to straw-coloured wine with a softer profile.
The Master Blender's role is to maintain consistency across those recipes and supervise the approximately 30-person production team at Pessione. The Master of Botanicals controls incoming raw materials: every botanical batch is assessed by smell and then submitted to chemical analysis before it is accepted into production.
Wines to know
The range in view
Martini Rosso is the original bottling, red-amber in colour, with a botanical recipe with bitter herbal character, warm spice, and a dry finish despite some residual sweetness. It is an aromatised wine classified as vermouth, meaning its base is wine rather than spirit, with botanicals adding the aromatic and bitter complexity. Serve cold or over ice and the botanical character opens; the warmth comes from the base wine and the spice components rather than from alcohol alone.
Martini Bianco sits at a sweeter, more floral register than Rosso. The colour is lighter, the nose shows white flower and vanilla notes, and the botanical selection is weighted toward sweetness and complexity rather than herbal bitterness. It is a different product from the same facility, differentiated by recipe rather than by appellation or grape.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
Martini Rosso. It is the founding product, made to Luigi Rossi's original recipe from 1863, and it is the bottle that shows what the company is built on: a botanical recipe applied to a base wine to produce an aromatised drink that is neither spirit nor still wine but something between them. Red-amber in the glass, herbal and warm on the nose, with bitter complexity and a dry finish that outlasts the sweetness. Serve cold, on ice, or with a single large ice cube and a slice of orange, which opens the botanical character and softens the bitterness slightly without obscuring it. Every other Martini product is a variation on the logic established here.