Vinous in London: Cappellano 1971-2012

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | OCTOBER 20, 2020 

This retrospective of Cappellano back to 1971, held in London for a small group of Vinous readers, was a fabulous opportunity to revisit a number of wines during what was a very different time in the world. The Cappellano Barolos remain some of the most idiosyncratic and deeply personal wines in the world. This vertical took place in May 2018. We had published an extensive Cappellano vertical a year earlier, so I wanted to wait a bit before publishing this one to balance coverage, and, with the blink of an eye, two years passed.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to get to know Baldo Cappellano while he was still alive. Visits lasted many hours and were always a mixture of wine and philosophy. The Barolos, known only to a few insiders, were inexpensive and easy to find. Cappellano did not send his wines out for review, so information on the domaine was so scant that I received numerous emails when I published my first tasting notes on the wines back in the Piedmont Report days. Baldo Cappellano did not care for scores much because he thought they created divisiveness amongst growers and asked that his wines not be given numerical ratings, which is why all the Cappellano wines in our database appear with tasting notes but no scores.

An extraordinary collection of ex-cellar bottles back to 1971.

This tasting was special for a number of reasons. Baldo Cappellano is no longer with us, although his son, Augusto, is a chip off the old block, as the saying goes. Clearly, the wines have become both expensive and very hard to find over the last decade. We don’t do many events at Vinous because they are not our core activity and organizing them to our standards requires an extraordinary amount of time. No detail is overlooked. All of the bottles in this vertical were purchased from the estate either on release or specifically for this tasting, which I don’t imagine will happen anytime soon given the extreme rarity of the wines, especially the older vintages. 

Choosing a venue in London that can handle our service requirements and deal with my obsession over temperature of the wines is not easy. The team at 67 Pall Mall, at the time led by Head Sommelier Terry Kandylis, did a phenomenal job. Over the years, I had heard some less than flattering comments about the food at 67, but our meal was, frankly delicious.

Each wine is served in its own glass so guests can easily revisit wines over the course of the evening.