In 1786, Antonio Benedetto Carpano mixed moscato, herbs and spices; today the brand belongs to Fratelli Branca, the same company behind Fernet
Carpano reaches 240 years in 2026 and has chosen an industry showcase to mark the date: the TFWA World Exhibition, the trade show for travel retail, the duty-free business, held in Cannes, France, from September 27 to October 1. According to The Spirits Business, the brand is at the stand of Fratelli Branca Distillerie, a Milan group that also produces Fernet-Branca and Branca Menta. The story it is bringing to the show begins in a shop in Turin.
According to Carpano's own account, in 1786 Antonio Benedetto Carpano mixed herbs and spices into moscato wine in the shop he kept on Piazza Castello, opposite the Royal Palace of Turin, and the drink won the favor of King Vittorio Amedeo III. The name comes from the German Wermut, meaning wormwood, the bitter herb that characterizes vermouth. The idea of flavoring wine with herbs was an old one, and the company recalls that the Romans already made an absinthiatum vinum. But it was Carpano's recipe, the brand says, that made the drink famous in the form known today; The Spirits Business notes that he is considered the creator of the category.
The business stayed in the family for more than a century. In 1820, Giuseppe Bernardino Carpano turned the shop into a liqueur and vermouth factory, still under the square's porticoes. In 1898, the third generation opened an industrial plant, and the historic shop closed its doors in 1916. The brand passed into the hands of Silvio Turati in 1939 and, in 2001, was bought outright by Fratelli Branca, which moved production to Milan.
One of the house's most-told stories is that of Punt e Mes. According to Carpano, on April 19, 1870, a stockbroker, in the middle of a conversation about shares that had risen a point and a half, asked for his usual Carpano corrected with half a measure of cinchona and used the dialect expression to place the order: punt e mes. The result, more bitter, became a product, and customers began ordering it with a gesture: thumb up, the point, and a horizontal stroke in the air, the half.
Today Carpano Rosso has 16% alcohol and is described by the brand as a vermouth with citrus and spiced notes, combined with the aromas of wormwood, to be drunk chilled and neat or in cocktails such as the Negroni. Under the rules Carpano summarizes on its website, vermouth must contain at least 75% wine, have artemisia as its characteristic ingredient and an alcohol content between 14.5% and 22%.
Sources: The Spirits Business (September 29, 2026), Carpano, official website: history, Punt e Mes and what vermouth is (September 30, 2026).
