Is dead Maurizio Gozzelinol’inventor of the Crodino. His wife Marisa and daughter Barbara announced it. The Piero Ginocchi Study Center of Crawlthe country of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola to whom the famous “blonde non-alcoholic” owes its name, recalls that Gozzelino was born in 1935 in Saluzzo (Cuneo), and then moved to work in the Antigorio valley, where he developed the mix of aromatic herbs that would become the recipe for the famous aperitif.
Production of the drink began on 28 July 1965. At the end of 2023 Crodino left Crodo and, since then, it has been produced in Novi Ligure (Alessandria). The Study Center remembers him as an “affable” person, a skilled communicator, generous, with the simple ways of a cultured but not exhibitionist person. Gozzelino, in 2021, became an honorary citizen of Crodo.
The collective imagination
«The blonde non-alcoholic who drives the world crazy» it wasn’t just an advertising slogan: it was a piece of the Italian collective imagination. Behind that formula which has entered the memory of generations was Maurizio Gozzelino, a Piedmontese winemaker and “wizard of essences”, who died in the night between Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd May at the age of 91. With him disappears the man who contributed to giving an identity to Crodino, the non-alcoholic aperitif which over time has become a symbol of the “Italian-style” aperitif, capable of spanning decades of advertising, television and customs.
The story of an invention
Originally from Saluzzo and trained atAlba Oenological InstituteGozzelino arrived in the Piedmontese municipality of Crodo in the early sixties, called by the entrepreneur Piero Ginocchi at the Terme di Crodo Spa. It is a phase of transformation: the plant, until then dedicated to mineral water from the springs of the Antigorio Valley, is preparing to enter the world of aperitifs. In this context, the intuition that will change everything is born. In 1965 the first 53,835 bottles of Crodino were produced.
The recipe – still secret today – is developed by Gozzelino: a calibrated balance of herbs, spices and roots, including vanilla, orange peel, ginger, absinthe, coriander and cloves, combined with local mineral water and aged in oak barrels for months. The result is a new, immediately recognizable flavour, which soon finds its consecration outside the laboratory.
