02 okt 150 Years of Grappa, One Glass of Elderflower: How Francoli Built Fiorente
The story of Francoli does not begin in a vineyard. It begins on a cart, going downhill.
In 1875, in the mountain village of Campodolcino, high in Lombardy’s Valchiavenna at nearly a thousand metres above sea level, a woodworker named Guglielmo Francoli started making grappa almost as an afterthought to his real trade. The problem was logistics. Grappa needs grape pomace, and grape pomace needs vineyards, and there are no vineyards at a thousand metres in the Alps. So Guglielmo loaded his cart with wood, travelled down into the valley to sell it, and came back up in autumn with pomace to distil. “Before it ever became a business, it began with a passion,” says Alberto Francoli, export manager for Gruppo Francoli, and that passion is the thread the family has spent five generations trying not to lose.
What survived from that era is less a recipe than a habit of mind. The pomace, once distilled, was dried on the still and burned as fuel, a loop that nobody at the time would have called sustainability, because the word didn’t exist for what was simply necessity. “Today we would call it a circular economy,” Alberto explains. “It is a principle we have never abandoned, and one that, many years later, became one of the foundations of our environmental policy.” Everything else changed. The stills moved to Ghemme in Piedmont, the technology modernised, the business grew from a handful of litres into a group spanning grappa, wine, liqueurs and even biomass energy. The instinct to use the raw material whole did not.
A detour that became a destination
Ghemme was never supposed to be permanent. When Luigi Francoli arrived there in 1951, his actual plan was to stay briefly and then emigrate to Australia. Instead he found a thread of the family’s own history waiting for him, a relative had already acquired a distillery in the town back in 1920, and the opportunity to pick that tradition back up was enough to change his course entirely. His four brothers joined him through the early 1950s, among them Alberto’s father, and together they built what the family now treats as the real founding moment of the modern distillery. Ghemme, as it turns out, was the right place almost by accident: a small town in the province of Novara sitting inside a serious winemaking tradition, which meant the raw material the Francolis needed was finally close at hand rather than a cart ride away.
Five generations later, Alberto describes his own family’s history less as a series of distinct chapters than as a baton passed continuously from hand to hand. An early marker of ambition surfaces in 1903, when a Francoli grappa flavoured with Achillea moscata, an Alpine herb locally called Iva, won gold at a national competition in Palermo, proof that something made largely for pleasure was starting to take itself seriously. What has stayed constant since is harder to pin down than a date, but Alberto names it plainly: “Respect for the raw material and the determination to use it completely.” A circular economy before anyone had the term for it, running underneath a business that, on paper, now looks remarkably diversified.
Alberto Francoli
From grappa to a flower nobody expected
That diversification is less scattered than it looks. Grappa led to wine, because grappa is made from what winemaking leaves behind, and by the late 1960s the family was planting its own vineyards to close that loop. Grappa also led to liqueurs: traditional Italian styles from the 1960s onward, then genuinely original ones, including Venetian Cream in 1978, Italy’s first cream liqueur made with fresh cream, and Opal Nera in the early 1990s, a black sambuca sharp enough to open its own category.
Fiorente belongs to that second, more experimental lineage. “We did not invent the elderflower liqueur category,” Alberto says, “but we recognised very early that this flower and its aromatic profile held extraordinary potential.” The timing wasn’t random. Around 2011, three years before launch, Francoli had already developed and refined its own elderflower recipe, well before the flavour had any real international footprint. What tipped the decision wasn’t market research so much as a signal coming out of South Tyrol, Austria, Germany and Switzerland, where a drink called the Hugo Spritz was starting to turn a regional familiarity with elderflower into something that looked exportable. “It was new, floral, fresh, immediate and easy to understand,” is how Alberto describes the flavour’s appeal at the time, and in 2014 Fiorente launched as what the company calls the first Italian elderflower liqueur built with international ambition from day one. “It is one of those cases,” he reflects, “where intuition came before the numbers.”
Where the flower actually comes from
Some of Fiorente’s elderflower grows wild within sight of the distillery itself, in the Novara area of Piedmont, at the foot of the Alps where waterways and cool habitats give the plant exactly the conditions it wants along hedgerows and woodland edges. “We do not want Fiorente merely to express the taste of elderflower,” Alberto explains, “but also the natural character of the flower from which it is born.” Demand outgrew what the local land could supply without strain, so part of the elderflower now comes from other carefully chosen areas of Piedmont, but the harvest itself has stayed resolutely manual. Flowers are hand-picked during a short window of full bloom in May, and not every bloom is taken, some are deliberately left to complete their cycle into elderberries, a small restraint that keeps the plant’s own ecosystem intact. “Perhaps that is the most beautiful part of all,” he adds, “behind a liqueur made today with modern technology, the very first gesture remains remarkably simple and ancient, a person choosing a flower and picking it by hand.”
What happens next is a race against the flower’s own fragility. The blooms are dried for a few days, infused in alcohol, then stabilised quickly through cooling and filtering to strip out the compounds most prone to oxidation before the rest of the recipe is blended in. The goal, as Alberto frames it, is modest and exacting at once: “To make sure that when you open a bottle of Fiorente, you can still find something that recalls the scent of elderflower at the very moment it is in bloom.” The connection back to grappa runs deeper than shared ownership. Fresh mint and lemon peel are infused separately, then distilled together, with the same instinct that governs the family’s grappa: don’t mask the raw material, sharpen it. A Master Distiller then combines that distillate with the elderflower infusion and lemon and lime juice. “So behind Fiorente,” Alberto says, “there is the mind of a distiller.”
Riding, and outlasting, a trend
Hugo’s success, in Alberto’s reading, came from two things landing at once: a flavour nobody in the wider spirits world had really used, and a format, the Spritz, that drinkers had already decided they loved. Elderflower offered something bitter aperitivo culture didn’t, an entry point for people who find Aperol or Campari too sharp, while the Spritz itself did something more ambitious than travel well: it exported the entire idea of the pre-dinner aperitivo into markets that never had that habit to begin with. Bartenders, for their part, have not treated Fiorente as a one-trick ingredient. A few bartenders in the United States have described it, half-joking, as “a kind of ketchup for cocktails,” a small amount capable of lifting almost anything, from Harvester’s Delight, Alberto’s own favourite serve (Fiorente paired with Moscato and Chardonnay grappa, lemon juice and grapes), to combinations the distillery never anticipated: rum, sake, lemongrass, red berries, apple, cinnamon, even their own grappa, turning up in drinks like Yuzu Flower Fizz and Flowergrass Swizzle. “Every time a bartender uses Fiorente in a way we had never imagined,” Alberto notes, “the product continues to be creative even after it has left the distillery.”
Finding its footing in the Netherlands
In the Dutch market, that creativity has had help from De Monnik Dranken, Francoli’s distribution partner since Fiorente’s earliest days there. The adoption curve followed a familiar shape for anything built on an unfamiliar flavour, slow at first, while awareness of elderflower and the Hugo Spritz itself had to be built almost from scratch. That curve has since bent sharply upward: in the past year, performance in the Netherlands has more than doubled, a shift Alberto reads as something more meaningful than a sales bump. “It means that Fiorente is progressively finding its place in the Dutch market,” he says, entering bars, reaching consumers, moving from a product being pitched to one people actively seek out.
What he wants that moment of discovery to deliver, in the end, comes down to one word. Fiorente is built from 100% natural ingredients and deliberately engineered against the syrupy sweetness that trips up a lot of elderflower liqueurs, using sucrose instead of glucose and less sugar overall than much of the category, with lemon’s citric acid hitting first and lime’s malic acid lingering longer underneath it. “Floral but never cloying. Sweet, but not syrupy. Delicate, yet with personality. And above all, fresh,” is how Alberto wants a first sip to land, with one further distinction: “I am not drinking simply a Hugo Spritz, but a Fiorente Hugo Spritz.” Because what the liqueur is ultimately chasing, 150 years and five generations after a man with a cart first hauled pomace down a mountain, is something closer to a signature than a recipe: the fragrance of elderflower and the freshness of Italy, in the same glass.
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