Gray Rose Co.
The Thorn
Issue I — 2025
The Thorn — Issue I

Going to
the Source

Dominic Bethel flew to Italy in December to choose wood by hand. He ended up drinking Barolo with a sommelier until midnight.

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There are easier ways to buy wood.

You could let someone else choose it. Let it arrive in a crate, wrapped in brown paper, already shaped into something approximating what you asked for. Most people do.

Most people never think twice about it.

The team at Gray Rose are not most people.

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II — Milan, December
Milan

The group landed at Malpensa on a grey December morning — Dominic Bethel, owner of Gray Rose, travelling alongside Gray Rose's Premium Beretta sales representative and two others from the industry who understood, without needing it explained, why this trip was worth making.

They had half a day in Milan before the drive south. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II first — one of the world's oldest shopping arcades, its iron and glass soaring above the mosaic floors of the Piazza del Duomo. The kind of place that makes you understand what it means for something to be built to last. Watch cases were studied. Acquisitions were made.

Then the Duomo itself — all 135 spires of it. They went inside, then up. Standing on the rooftop of the Duomo di Milano, looking across a city that has been building beautiful things for a thousand years, is a particular kind of reminder of what craftsmanship actually means and how long it can endure.

By early afternoon they had a rental car and the road south to Brescia.

Lake Garda

The hotel was the San Vigilio on Lake Garda — a property so perfectly situated that it barely needs describing. The lake in December is still and cold and an impossible shade of blue-grey, the mountains rising behind it into cloud. James Bond has been filmed on these roads. You understand why.

That evening, Brescia. Dinner in a city that has been making steel since the Romans — which is, not coincidentally, also the city where Beretta has operated for five hundred years. The connection between place and product is not incidental. It is everything.

They went through five pallets. Two hundred blanks were chosen.

Meccanica del Sarca — Day Two
The Wood

Into the Dolomites

Day two began early with a drive into the Dolomites, following the edge of Lake Garda into the mountains to reach Meccanica del Sarca — Beretta's primary wood supplier, and one of the finest walnut sources in the world.

Nothing quite prepares you for it.

The facility holds pallets of Turkish walnut blanks stacked six feet high and four feet square — raw, unworked timber at the beginning of its long transformation into something a shooter will carry for the rest of their life. The smell is immediate and overwhelming: aged, cut lumber, the particular sweetness of walnut that has been drying slowly, patiently, the way good things do.

The process is simple in theory. In practice, it takes seven hours and leaves your hands burning.

Each blank is rubbed with alcohol — a quick, practiced motion that opens the grain, reveals the figure, shows you what is hiding beneath the surface. The curl, the contrast, the depth. What will feel right under a cheek. What has the character to become something worth owning.

It is the kind of detail most buyers will never know about. It is the kind of detail that matters anyway.

5 Pallets reviewed
200 Blanks selected
7 Hours of selection
Lake Garda — Dolomite Mountain Range
Day Three

Beretta Due

To walk the floors of Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta is to stand inside five centuries of unbroken continuity. The same family. The same valley. The same commitment to making firearms that outlast the people who make them.

The morning began with a briefing on something not yet announced to the world: the DT11 Super Sport. Five hundred guns, individually serialized. Each one a refinement of the platform that has won more World Championships than any other competition shotgun in history.

After the briefing came the work Dominic had come for: specifying custom stock dimensions for a unique run of Gray Rose Beretta factory stocks. Measurements discussed, details that will make these guns fit differently — better — than anything that comes off a standard production line.

Then a tour of the plant. Machines that do things to steel that seem impossible. Hands that do things to wood that machines cannot. In one corner of the facility, existing clients' custom engraving projects sat in various stages of completion — intricate work, months in the making, destined for guns that will be carried to shoots and handed to children and eventually grandchildren.

Lunch. Then something unexpected.

A private tour of the Beretta family gun collection.

There are firearms in that collection that belong in museums — and some that do belong in museums, on loan. To stand in front of them is to understand, in a way that no photograph or description can convey, what it means to have been making something for five hundred years. The progression of craft. The accumulation of knowledge. The long, slow refinement of an idea across generations of a single family who never sold, never left, never stopped.

The Beretta Family Gun Collection — Gardone Val Trompia

He was, with appropriate Italian drama and good humor, all but kidnapped. He came willingly.

Lo Sparviere — Evening
Lo Sparviere

The Vineyard

Mid-afternoon, they drove to Lo Sparviere.

The vineyard sits above Lake Iseo in the Franciacorta wine region — one of Italy's finest, and among its least known outside of the country. Franciacorta produces méthode champenoise sparkling wines of exceptional quality, and Lo Sparviere produces some of the best of them. The estate is beautiful in the particular way that Italian agricultural land is beautiful: ancient, purposeful, unhurried.

They met Gabriele.

The sommelier at Lo Sparviere is a man who takes his work as seriously as they take theirs — which is to say, very seriously indeed, and with considerable joy. The tasting that followed was the kind that happens when someone who truly knows wine decides you are worth knowing. Bottles appeared. Stories were exchanged. The afternoon extended itself, pleasantly, into early evening.

By the time anyone thought to leave, it was clear that no one particularly wanted to.

So they didn't.

Gabriele had plans — a girlfriend, an evening already spoken for. These plans were, with appropriate Italian drama and good humor, abandoned. He was, as Dominic would later describe it, all but kidnapped. He came willingly.

Barolo with the steaks, Gabriele explained, because there is no other choice, and because some things are simply correct.

La Casa Nel Bosco
La Casa Nel Bosco

The restaurant is called La Casa Nel Bosco — The House in the Woods — and it earns the name. Set back from the road, quiet, the kind of place that requires knowing someone who knows someone. They knew Gabriele.

He ordered everything.

This is the correct way to dine in Italy when you are in the company of someone who knows what they are doing. You surrender the menu. You trust. You are rewarded.

Antipasto arrived. Then pasta. Then — the moment Gabriele had been building toward all evening — a ribeye and a T-bone, brought to the table with the gravity they deserved. A magnum of Barolo appeared alongside them. Not suggested. Insisted upon. Barolo with the steaks, Gabriele explained, because there is no other choice, and because some things are simply correct.

There were four courses in total. Tiramisu to finish, in the way that Italy insists things finish — sweetly, slowly, without apology.

Many bottles of wine were drunk. Many hours passed. The conversation moved, as it does between people who have spent a day doing serious work and have decided the evening deserves equal attention, from business to life to the things that connect them: craft, quality, the belief that the details matter even when — especially when — no one is watching.

By the end of the evening, something had been established that goes beyond a business relationship or a pleasant dinner. A tradition had been made. Gabriele is, as Dominic tells it, a friend for life.

A tradition had been made.

Gardone Val Trompia — December

Five Hundred Years.
Five Hundred Guns.

The DT11 Super Sport will be available through Gray Rose in limited quantities — approximately twenty-five pieces from our allocation of five hundred worldwide. Each one individually serialized. And while the Super Sports carry their own distinction, the hand-selected Turkish walnut chosen blank by blank in the mountains above Lake Garda will find its way into our standard DT11 and SL2 inventory — wood chosen the way it should be chosen: by hand, in the mountains, until it was right.

Model DT11 Super Sport
Edition 500 Year Anniversary
Serialized 1 of 500
Available ~25 pieces
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