Cappellano

The Cappellano family has long been associated with Serralunga d’Alba, with the main square in the village even taking their name. The winery was founded in 1870 by Filippo Cappellano, a lawyer who gradually acquired 60 hectares of vines around the village. Filippo’s son, Giovanni, developed the estate, but it was Filippo’s other son Giuseppe who made its name. A trained pharmacist, he created Barolo Chinato – a fortified, aromatised wine made with Barolo steeped in spices and herbs. When Giovanni died in 1912, Giuseppe took over the estate, and the property’s Barolo Chinato is still bottled under his name, “Dott. G. Cappellano”. 

When Giuseppe passed away in 1955, in the wake of the Second World War, the substantial estate was broken up, with some of the vineyards sold off. Some of the family continued to make wine and Barolo Chinato, including Giuseppe’s son, Francesco Augusto who was a trained oenologist. 

It was Teobaldo Cappellano, however, who built the estate as we know it today. Born and raised in Eritrea, he returned to Italy in 1969, a year after his father had passed away, and took over the winery in 1970. He scaled back production to focus on quality over quantity, farming just four hectares of vines and producing fewer than 800 cases each year. 

Winemaking was, and remains today, deeply traditional, with all the fruit de-stemmed, long fermentations and macerations, indigenous yeast, minimal sulphur, use of cement tanks for fermentation and old botti for maturation (a minimum three years for the Barolos), and unfiltered. 

Teobaldo (sometimes referenced as just Baldo) focused on organic farming, and he became an early pioneer of sustainable agriculture in Italy. He was also president of the influential Vini Veri group (along with the likes of Rinaldi, Serafino Rivella, Le Boncie and more), championing low-intervention winemaking. In 1983, Teobaldo famously banned journalists from tasting his wines, unless they agreed to review them without scores. 

Teobaldo passed away in 2009, but his son Augusto – the fifth generation of the family – had been working with his father for years and took over. 

The property still works four hectares of vines, most of which is in Serralunga’s Gabutti Cru. The wines used to carry the name of the Cru, but Teobaldo stopped using the term in 1997 in protest of the appellation’s expansion, something he felt had diluted the quality by including inferior sites. 

They make two Barolos from the site. Piè Rupestris represents two-thirds of production, made from vines planted in the 1940s, producing a rich and generous style of Barolo. The rare Piè Franco comes from own-rooted parcels, planted in 1989 with the Michet clone of Nebbiolo, an effort to recreate pre-phylloxera Barolo – and producing a wine that is exotic and ethereal. Production remains tiny, making around 9,000 bottles of Rupestris and less than 2,000 of Franco in a typical vintage. 

Cappellano also makes a Nebbiolo d’Alba from a small parcel of vines in Novello. Up to and including the 2020 vintage, they made a Barbera d’Alba from the Gabutti Cru; but from 2021 they have started making Barbera from a friend’s vines in Roero (with around 4,000 bottles produced a year). 

The family continues to make Barolo Chinato, to Giuseppe’s original recipe, which is kept a family secret and passed down from generation to generation. The various herbs and spices are still ground by hand in a pestle and mortar. 

With such limited production and a lofty reputation, the wines are unsurprisingly hard to find, sought after by collectors around the world. The Cappellano wines sit comfortably alongside those of Bartolo Mascarello, Rinaldi and Conterno. As Antonio Galloni has written, they are “some of the most classically ethereal, nuanced and elegant wines in all of Piedmont”. 

The early wines were bottled under “Dott. G. Cappellano”, as the Barolo Chinato still is, in honour of Giuseppe Cappellano. The other wines, however, have been bottled under just “Cappellano” since the 1980s (with the last Barolo under the Doctor’s name the 1985). In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, a merchant in Turin bottled some of Cappellano’s wines under the name G. Troglia, often in unusually shaped bottles.