Four hundred and twenty-one years in every bottle. Not metaphorically, literally: the liquid inside a bottle of Acetaia Giusti, the oldest balsamic vinegar producer on earth, has been aging in the same family’s barrels, tended by the same family’s hands, in the same city, since 1605. Claudio Stefani Giusti is the latest of those hands. He will be, he has decided, far from the last.
Giusti was brought up as a child in the attic on Via Farini in the heart of Modena, where his uncle Giuseppe kept the ancient barrels. The smell of the aging vinegar arrived before the door even opened, intensifying with every step up the stairs. He did not choose this world so much as he was born into its scent. When the moment came to claim it, no version of himself could walk away.
As chief executive officer, Giusti didn’t land here overnight. He spent eight years in a consulting company working across Europe, managing teams of different nationalities, learning how different cultures approach a problem, a deadline, a room. He came back fascinated by difference, by how Americans plan, how Italians improvise, by what each culture reveals about the other. “I wanted to bring these values to a very ancient and traditional business,” he says.
He came back to a company of five people and a turnover that fit on a single page. He came back because someone was about to sell it to strangers. For ten years, he built it, shaped it, hired every person in it. When a private equity firm arrived with an offer, the family was ready to listen. Claudio was not. “Know who you are,” he says. “Be able to say no.” So he bought the company himself, because the only way to run it on his own terms was to own it.
Giusti runs his company the way he makes his vinegar: nothing wasted, nothing unnecessary. Every bottle of Acetaia Giusti leaves Modena in plastic-free packaging. The company runs entirely on solar energy. The shipping boxes are made with environmentally friendly materials. And when a coffee machine supplier told him their cups for office use were compostable, he was unmoved. “I don’t care,” he said. “You still need to produce them.” Instead, each of his hundred employees has a white porcelain cup with their name on it. They wash it themselves.
Acetaia Giusti appears on sushi menus in Tokyo, on cocktail lists the company pioneered as early as 2014, and in the kitchens of chefs who treat a twenty-five-year-old vinegar the way others treat a first-growth Bordeaux. Eighty countries. Six flagship stores, each one inside a historic center, each a world unto itself. “We are heritage, we are tradition,” Giusti says, “but we are so much innovation, we are so much new world contemporaneity.”
The product itself, he is careful to explain, is not simply old. It is precise. “Vinegar is like wine,” he says. “What makes a great wine? The type of grapes, the care, the attention to quality, the fact that you produce less quantity, the fact that you take more time.” A competitor can age their vinegar and call it aged. They cannot buy four hundred years of knowing exactly what that means.
Giusti now has a commercial office in New Jersey, its fourth international branch. The American market has only just begun to understand what it is holding.
Giusti shows up at food expos around the world with a spoon. One drop. A balsamic vinegar aged twenty-five years. “There are a lot of people who don’t know a good balsamic vinegar,” he says. “And when you taste it, you say: oh, wow. I didn’t think that. I didn’t know it could be so thick, so sweet, so dense.” Most people have never encountered the real thing. The moment they do, everything changes.
The barrels, though, do not change. Six hundred of them, the oldest still holding liquid that was sealed before Napoleon, before the unification of Italy, before almost everything the modern world considers fixed. A continuous, patient conversation between wood and time that no amount of technology has yet found a way to accelerate. And yet, here it is. Still.
There are seventeen generations in Acetaia Giusti Modena’s bottle. Claudio Giusti intends to add one more.
Acetaia Giusti balsamic vinegars are available in eighty countries worldwide. giusti.com
Images: Maestri Aufiero
