Distilleria Romano Levi

Fire kept close to the copper

The flame sits under copper, close enough that the distiller has to stay with it. Romano Levi, Winemaker at Distilleria Romano Levi in Neive, worked from that nearness, making grappa in a house-distillery where heat, fruit, and the still remained the central grammar. His career here ran from 1945 to 2008, more than six decades spent holding the craft to first principles rather than ornament. Levi described it without polish: “I make grappa: the blood of fire, the pangs of life, poetry are yours.” The sentence gives the place its scale. Not grandeur, but pressure. Not display, but contact with flame.

He also remembered a trade that had thinned around him. “Back then there were many... Usually distilleries worked with direct-fire stills.” That recollection matters in Neive because Distilleria Romano Levi keeps one of Italy's last direct-fire copper alembic stills at the center of the work. The method asks for presence. Fire does not allow the same distance as a gentler system; the hands have to read temperature through practice, smell, sound, and the behavior of the pomace as it gives itself over to spirit.

A limited run from the Langhe

The production remains small in the language of the trade: approximately 20,000 bottles annually, drawn from 15-20 barrels per year. Nebbiolo, Barbera, Dolcetto, and Arneis place the distillery inside the Langhe, where grape character arrives first as wine culture and then returns through grappa. The names attached to Levi's signature spirits, Donna Selvatica, Grappa di Barolo, Grappa Bianca, Grappa Moscato, and Grappa Paglierina, read like a compact vocabulary of source, color, and temperament.

The house presents itself as sustainable in philosophy, but the deeper discipline is older and more physical: direct fire, copper, limited batches, and labels made by hand rather than a branding office. Levi's Wild Woman drawings remain part of the bottle's identity, not as decoration separated from the spirit, but as another trace of the same hand. The label and the grappa share a refusal to overexplain. One marks the glass; the other carries the heat.

The still house as a living museum

The room is quiet, rustic, and intimate, with the feeling of a working house that has not been polished into distance. Simple objects carry weight here because they have use. The copper still, the hand-drawn labels, the scent of artisanal grappa production, and the plain surfaces of the distillery gather around Levi's presence without turning him into a relic. Visitors come through a living museum, but the phrase only works if the second word does not soften the first.

The tasting room holds serenity rather than spectacle. Grappa tasting and the distillery tour return the attention to the method: fruit already pressed, fire brought near, spirit cut from the old apparatus, bottles finished with marks that still point back to Romano Levi. Donna Selvatica is the name of this house and of the hand that drew its wild woman.