One Word on the Label

The label reads Otin Fiorin, and under it a single word: Franco. Anyone who knows the current bottling will expect Piè Franco, and will be right to. This bottle simply predates the phrase.

The Parcel

In the late 1980s Teobaldo Cappellano planted a section of the Gabutti vineyard in Serralunga d’Alba with Nebbiolo Michet on its own roots. No American rootstock, no graft. By then Europe had spent the better part of a century rebuilding its vineyards on grafted vines because of phylloxera, and the general opinion was that the louse would find these rows soon enough.

It did not. The vines held, and the wine from them was bottled separately.

For the 1994, 1995 and 1996 vintages the label carried only the word Franco beneath Otin Fiorin. From 1997 the fuller designation, Piè Franco - Michet, appears at the bottom of the label and has stayed there since. So this is the second year of the ungrafted parcel, and one of only three vintages to leave the cellar with that one-word label.

The same vineyard also has grafted vines, and the wine from those is bottled as Piè Rupestris. The house has always maintained that the two are made the same way. That they nonetheless come out different is the whole point of the exercise.

The Man

Teobaldo Cappellano is remembered for what he refused as much as for what he made. From the early 1980s he asked that his wines not be scored, and made access to the cellar conditional on it. The request was honoured, and for decades the major publications carried no points for Cappellano. He kept barriques out of the cellar and over-extraction out of the wine, and with Beppe Rinaldi and Bartolo Mascarello he was happy to be called one of the last of the old guard. He founded Vini Veri, the association of natural growers, and led it.

None of that is decoration. The wine tastes like the position.

Thirty-One Years On

Garnet, bricking at the rim. The nose was unusually tightly focused. Earth and dried herbs came first, then mint, bark and forest floor, with a sweet, waxy red fruit sitting over all of it rather than in front of it.

The palate was the surprise. The attack was close to explosive: sweet fruit first, then tannin that was dense but soft, and an acidity that ran bright through the middle. Underneath, the Serralunga signature of liquorice, juniper and tar, stern in outline but not stingy with fruit. The finish went long and had the silky, slightly ethereal texture that people who follow this wine tend to associate with the ungrafted parcel.

At thirty-one years it was fully open and still had something behind it. This is a very good moment to be drinking it.

There is a small pleasure in drinking the wine of a man who spent his life refusing scores, and not scoring it.

It came near the end of an Italian evening that had opened with the Rare 1988, passed through the Ornellaia Bianco 2013 and the Roagna Crichët Pajé 1982, and set it beside the Aldo Conterno Granbussia 1982 — two very different ideas of Barolo, side by side.