EVERYTHING WORTH KNOWING ABOUT GRAPPA
STARTS AT ONE ADDRESS IN PIEDMONT
Antica Distilleria Sibona. Piobesi d'Alba
Why it Belongs Behind the Bar
Start with the blanc grappas — clean, precise, immediately food-friendly — and you already have a digestif list with a point of difference. Keep going and the range covers ground most single producers never attempt. The Civico 10 Vermouth is a serious cocktail ingredient that gives your Negroni a genuinely Italian backbone and hands your bartenders an identity worth building around. The MAeCO' gins bring craft credentials and a story compelling enough to carry a conversation across the bar without any help from you.
For guests who arrive knowing their whisky, the Tuttogrado cask-strength expressions meet them where they are and take them somewhere new. For the occasions that demand something beyond the back bar — corporate gifting, private dining, the collector who wants a bottle worth keeping — the Millesimata vintage-dated decanters handle it with authority.
One distillery. Every occasion covered. And sitting above all of it: IWSC World's Best Grappa, 2016.
Use it.
We are proud to partner with Antica Distilleria Sibona — one of Piedmont's most distinguished and versatile distilleries, and a producer that has spent generations quietly making the case that Italian spirits deserve serious attention.
Based in Piobesi d'Alba, in the heart of Piedmont's wine country, Sibona works exclusively with fresh marc from the region's most celebrated vineyards — Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera, Nebbiolo, Moscato, Arneis — and distils everything in-house, in copper pot stills, under the supervision of master distillers and oenologists who care deeply about what ends up in the glass.
The result is a portfolio of forty-two expressions that stretches from crystal-clear unaged blancs to decade-aged vintage reserves, from cask-strength barrel samples to an aged Italian gin that has no interest in being ordinary.
WHY WE CHOSE sibona
Grappa has a reputation problem. It is the spirit that arrives uninvited at the end of a restaurant meal, poured from a dusty bottle into a small glass nobody asked for and accepted out of politeness. Cold, harsh, and forgotten by the time you reach the door.
Sibona is how that conversation ends.
The distillery was awarded Best Grappa in the World at the IWSC in 2016. That alone should make any serious drinks buyer pay attention. But what convinced us was the range — the sheer ambition of it. Unaged blancs that capture pure varietal character. Riservas finished in Port, Madeira, Sauternes, Sherry and Tennessee Whiskey casks. Cask-strength Tuttogrado expressions bottled as barrel samples at up to 57.5%.
And the Millesimata Vintage Reserves — numbered, dated, presented in handcrafted wooden cases — that sit comfortably in the same gifting and collecting conversation as aged Cognac or single malt Scotch.
There is a version of this partnership where we carry one or two Sibona expressions as a conversation starter. We chose to carry the whole argument instead.
from one address,
many worlds
The name Civico 10 tells you something about how Sibona thinks. Via Roma 10, Piobesi d'Alba — the original address of the distillery — became the name of their Vermouth di Torino. Not a borrowed name, not a romanticised marketing construct. An address. The decision to name a product after where it was made says something about confidence, and something about pride. At Sibona, it appears to be both.
Civico 10 is a Vermouth di Torino Rosso Superiore built on a Nebbiolo d'Alba DOC wine base, infused with twenty-two botanicals including Piedmontese artemisia, bitter orange, vanilla and gentian. Rich, velvety and properly complex — the kind of Vermouth that prompts bartenders to quietly reconsider what they have been putting in their Negroni.
Hills, Sea and a Gin Worth Talking About
MAeCO' stands for MAre e COllina — Sea and Hill. Sibona's Italian Premium Dry Gin draws botanicals from two landscapes: the Piedmontese hills contribute juniper, lavender, sage, rosemary, damascena rose and Nebbiolo vine leaves; the Ligurian coast brings lemon, thyme, Pernambucco orange and Genovese basil DOP. Each botanical is distilled separately to preserve its individual character, then blended and diluted with Eva water from Europe's highest natural spring at 2,042 metres.
The MAeCO' Invecchiato takes the same botanical foundations and ages them in Port casks. The result is amber, layered and considerably more interesting than most aged gins on the market. Both bottles are produced in recycled wild glass — a considered choice that reflects the same attention to detail Sibona brings to everything in the range.
World-Class Stopped Meaning Anything. Sibona Gave
It Back
There is a phrase that gets used rather a lot in the drinks trade — world-class. It has been applied to enough ordinary bottles that it has largely stopped meaning anything.
Sibona earned it.
Forty-two expressions. One distillery. A portfolio that begins with a clean, precise grappa blanc and ends with a numbered, vintage-dated collector's decanter. Everything between — the gin, the vermouth, the cask-finished riservas, the barrel-strength Tuttograd expressions, the botanical liqueurs — is made with the same insistence on quality and the same refusal to cut corners.
This is precisely what Alcology is for. Finding producers who have been too busy perfecting what is in the bottle to worry about whether Hong Kong has noticed yet. Sibona has been at Via Roma 10 for generations. It was time we introduced them properly.