In 1875, a young guy named Laurent Ottoz, at the tender age of eight, migrated from Aosta Valley to France at the tender age of eight, following in the footsteps of numerous people of the time. In this new country he approached the spirits’ world working in a transalpine distillery, and thus began to write the history of Ottoz liqueurs, company of which he will be the founder. When he grew up he moved to Marseille, where, in the old port area, he opened the famous “Café des Alpins”, with which he supplied the entire district with his liqueurs.
In 1902 he came back to his native land and bought a new bar in the center of Aosta, where he began to produce his own génépy, known and sold as the Alpine Liqueur Elixir Génépy. With great skills in creating advertising campaigns and in promoting his product, Laurent managed to make his brand known throughout the Italian peninsula, where throughout all the
XX century he traded his own product. For many years the Ottoz génépy has been the only symbol of the typical Aosta Valley product for all those ones who loved our valley. Going through this story, we come to 2005 when Ottoz liqueurs officially become part of the great family of the St. Roch Distilleries, based in Quart, the oldest distilleries in the Aosta Valley founded by the descendants of the Levi distillers.
Here, in a reality increasingly attentive to innovation and to the link with the territory, a highly prized discontinuous alembic – technologically controlled – works continuously together with the latest generation of bottling machinery. Tradition, innovation and the bond with the territory are the key points of the distillery based on the outskirts of Aosta, according to which innovation does not represent a break with the past but is born from the ability to know how to translate the wisdom of our ancestors into everyday life.
To date, the company’s flagship products are Ebo Lebo Gran Riserva – a reinterpretation of the famous “mother-in-law digester” from Aosta Valley, enriched with the infusion of saffron and génépy produced entirely in the fields of the Rosset Terroir farm – and the Elixir Génépy Centenario, a génépy made of Artemisia Genipi (male Genepi).