Del Professore Founder's Story

"The complexity of vermouth is based on the complexity of wine: the spices, the herbs, the sweetness, the bitterness. For me, one of the goals we have is to let people understand that not only is vermouth essential to mixology but is also perfect when enjoyed neat."

A passionate brand advocate, Leuci's journey into the world of vermouth began around 2010 when he co-founded the Jerry Thomas Project and set out to match the legendary American bartender's recipes as accurately as possible. "We bought I don't know how many books-recipes from a closed distillery, liqueurs books from the 1700s and 1800s," he says. "We understood that the vermouth that started to be exported to the US in 1838 was totally different from the style of vermouth that people are mixing today."

For Leuci, vermouth was foundational to the growth of the cocktail as a category, and the export of vermouth to the US is an essential landmark in the golden age of mixology. "The cocktail category was so boring! Whiskey, dash of bitters, little bit of sugar, some ice; brandy, dash of bitters, little bit of sugar, some ice. Everything was like that," he says. "If you take a look at two early bartending books, Jerry Thomas's 1862 bar book and Harry Johnson's bar book, you see that essentially 90 percent of the cocktail recipes are with vermouth."

Unable to find a vermouth that matched the flavour profile the greats had used, Leuci and his crew decided to create their own. The name they chose, Italian for "the Professor", pairs vermouth's Italian heritage with a nod to Jerry Thomas, known in his lifetime and beyond as "the Professor".

Reinventing Vermouth di Torino

Vermouth, at its simplest, is a fortified and aromatised wine. But Leuci places it in a tradition which extends back to the spiced and flavoured wines drunk in the Mediterranean thousands of years ago. "Yes, technically we can call vermouth just aromatised and fortified wine, but I like to see vermouth as something that contains the history of the world, especially the Mediterranean," he says. "I divide the definition of vermouth into different parts, the technical one and the more romantic one."

Leuci traces vermouth's romantic story through Roman spiced wines and medieval medicinal mixes to its culmination in the 1700s when fortified vermouths first began to appear. But until he and other producers started work on structuring a Geographical Indication-an EU legal definition and guarantor of authenticity-the category was poorly defined.

"There was a technical definition saying vermouth is spiced and fortified wine and has to be produced with at least 75 percent wine, containing artemisia as the main flavouring agent," Leuci says. "People started to produce vermouths using not only different wines but, for example, using any kind of artemisia that they can find."

While the category of vermouth was too widely used to be protected, the Vermouth di Torino Geographical Indication, which came into force in 2017, enshrined specific traditions of Italian vermouth. "When you buy a Vermouth di Torino bottle you know, for example, that all the wines are Italian, and the artemisia comes from Piedmont; you know that it's absolutely not allowed to use any chemical colouring, any chemical flavouring, nothing that is not essentially natural," Leuci explains. A sub-category, Vermouth di Torino Superiore, has even more stringent requirements.

Crafting Del Professore

For Leuci, the careful production method, which hasn't changed since Campari acquired the brand in 2023, is key to creating a vermouth that not only stars in cocktails but merits being sipped neat. Del Professore has a base of Italian Moscato wine, a table wine rather than an industrial wine. Herbs and spices are sourced locally where practicable.

In fact, rather than buying in extracts or infusions, Del Professore starts from raw ingredients. "When it's the season for oranges, we buy oranges and we do an infusion of oranges, when it's the season for lemons we do the same thing," Leuci says. "When our suppliers bring us the artemisia and other botanicals Click here to enter text. we prepare in the distillery all the infusions we need, starting from raw materials."

And, paradoxically for a cocktail bartender whose product is inspired by and named for the doyen of Golden Age mixology, Leuci's mission extends beyond the back bar to the consumer wine rack. "I want to stop people looking at vermouth as just a cocktail ingredient and start to think of it as a wine," he says.