Produttori del Barbaresco and Cappellano
Here's a sweet little afternoon offer for you. It's not often that you get the chance to offer wines with age on them, in quantity, at what is, comparatively, a really nice value. Today's one of those rare days!
These two gems have just been secured in Italy and will be here as fast as I can possibly get them because they'll be exactly what you want to have at the ready come September!
CAPPELLANO DOLCETTO d'ALBA 2011
$39/btl
$421.40/case of 12
Cappellano, whose wines went from insider gems to unicorns in the last two years, are now among the most highly allocated wines on the market. Believe it or not, though, for every ten cases of Barolo I get of Cappellano, I get maybe one case of the Dolcetto. There's never much to go around, and all the hard-core Piedmont fans clamor for the 'lesser' (and I emphasize the quotes there) wines from this most traditional of producers. Typically, I offer whatever Dolcetto I get to a few of my oldest Cappellano customers and that's it.
Really.
So when one of my suppliers sent me an offer for a rather sizeable lot of Dolcetto, I was psyched. Here's the kicker -- this is a sizeable lot of the 2011 Dolcetto, which is now three vintages old and, when it comes to this wine, is pretty much the prime drinking age!
Cappellano's Dolcetto is always very tightly-wound on release and, with the exception perhaps of Roddolo's Superiore, is probably the most structured Dolcetto you'll find. The fine acidity and tannin give way after a 3-5 year stint in the cellar and yield all of the brambly, herbaceous goodness that lurks underneath.
Like I said before, just in time for Fall, you'll have a mature, complex, nearly impossible-to-get wine from one of the world's truly-storied producers for less than $40.
What else?
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PRODUTTORI del BARBARESCO BARBARESCO 1983
$81/btl (net, ltd)
The greatest value in ageworthy Piemontese wine is, and probably always has been, the basic Barbaresco of Produttori del Barbaresco. 1983 is not a banner vintage, but it's the kind of vintage where this wine excels. In good-not-great years, they typically skip bottling their nine single-cru riserva wines and all of that top fruit ends up in the 'normale'. 1983 was one of those years. I've had a number of these vintages over the years in addition to the '83 ('81, '86, '93) and they've always been quite lovely, even if they wouldn't own the table at a wine-porn dinner.
The '83 is one of the best such wines I've had and is a really surprising bottle of fully-mature wine -- it's fresh, elegant, floral, nuanced.
How else would you describe classic Barbaresco?
BOTH WINES ARRIVE SEPT 2016
