Antica Distilleria Bordiga Elisir Viola (50CL, 20% Vol.)
Made with violet flowers which color the fields of our valleys blue for a few days, this Elixir is at the same time sweet, fragrant and unmistakably refined in flavor and colour.
The Elisr of the Antica Bordiga Distillery
Typical liqueurs of popular culture with low alcohol content. What distinguishes Bordiga Elixirs are the authenticity and quality of the raw materials always used for their preparation. Excellent if drunk alone as a light digestive after a meal or for a tonic mid-afternoon break, essential for giving many cocktails a particular touch that makes the difference, making every drink excellent.
History of the Ancient Bordiga Distillery
Pietro Bordiga is a passionate herbalist, with a profound knowledge of Alpine botanicals and oriental spices which were much sought after at the time.
His parents moved from Valle Grana (also home to one of the most famous cheeses in the world, Castelmagno) to Turin, the first capital of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy.
Here Pietro's son marries the daughter of the owners of a renowned café in the city, the Caffè Dilei.
In this Risorgimento context, above all thanks to his botanical knowledge, Pietro Bordiga invents a recipe for Vermouth di Torino (created in its modern version in Turin a few decades earlier), which it was immediately enormously appreciated in the city.
He then decided to start his own business as a Vermouth producer and opened his own distillery in Cuneo.
The success is immediate, the excellence of his product earns him requests from various important places in the city, so much so that even today the historic place in Turin, the Caffè Mulassano, one of the oldest in Italy, has its own Vermouth produced with the exclusive Bordiga recipe.
The choice of Cuneo is obviously dictated by sentimental factors, it is the city of origin of the Bordiga family. But above all it is the geographical position of Cuneo, nestled in the mountains, which plays an important role in the choice of venue.
Cuneo is also very close to the Langhe where the excellent wines of Piedmont come from (including the famous Barolo and Barbaresco), and is at the foot of the Alpine valleys where medicinal herbs grow spontaneously which, thanks to the proximity of the Mediterranean sea, are particularly rich in essential oils .
Wine, medicinal herbs and fine oriental spices form the basis of Vermouth di Torino, the product with which Bordiga is born.
Over the years the company developed thanks to the authenticity and quality of its products and became the point of reference not only for Vermouths, but also for liqueurs and spirits, especially Alpine ones, but not only: at the beginning of the 1900s in in the Bordiga stills, a juniper distillate is produced that still today has nothing to envy of the most famous gins in the world.
Centuries pass, times change, the great crisis of the 1920s but above all the post-war period saw great changes and even the production of liquor factories was affected.
Nowadays, thanks also to the synthesis and production of artificial flavourings, high quantities can be produced at economical prices, obviously of mediocre or even low quality.
Small artisans suffer from this situation: either they transform and become enormous industrial realities or they are gradually destined to close down.
Bordiga does not adapt to this evolution and production remains the same as its origins even if the difficulties are enormous, as evidenced by the countless closures of well-known brands.
The philosophy and quality of the products that inspired the founder remained unchanged; he continued to produce, always starting from selected, quality raw materials.
Characteristics that remain today: the good Piedmontese wine, the Alpine medicinal herbs still hand-picked by the mountaineers, the finest spices, the purest grain alcohol, the most refined sugar and the water of our Alps constitute, to our days just like way back in 1888, the basis with which our master distillers, with their ancestral and jealously guarded wisdom, produce the renowned Bordiga products today appreciated throughout the world world.
