Cavallotto
Most estates in Barolo are assembled. A parcel here. A parcel bought in a good year. A parcel that came through a cousin. The map of who owns what looks like a shattered windscreen.
Cavallotto owns a hill.
Bricco Boschis, in Castiglione Falletto. Twenty-three hectares, all of it touching, with the house and the cellar sitting at the bottom. Almost everything they bottle grew within sight of the front door.
Giacomo Cavallotto bought the place in 1928 and sold the fruit to other people. His grandsons Olivio and Gildo started keeping it. The first bottle with the family name on it came out in 1948, at a time when almost nobody in the village was bottling anything. Alfio, Giuseppe and Laura run it now.
Alfio took me up to the tower in Castiglione Falletto. Ninth or tenth century, depending who you ask. From the top you can see every village in Barolo at once, and the Alps behind them if the air is clear. He points out that this spot used to be a border. Alba under Spanish influence on one side, Castiglione under French on the other. Two states, one hill sitting in the seam between them.
He tells you this the way other people give you directions to the station.
What you notice about Cavallotto is an absence. There's no story being sold. No renovation, no consultant, no rebrand, no film crew. They let the grass grow between the rows in 1974 and stopped using herbicide while the neighbours were still finding it funny, and then they carried on for fifty years while the rest of the industry invented language for what they were doing.
Critics have made a small genre out of calling them the best Barolo producer nobody has heard of. It's meant kindly. It's also a diagnosis. Stay on one hill and never leave it, and you don't accumulate much of a legend.
I asked Alfio whether that ever bothered him.
He looked at the hill for a while and said the wine is the same either way.
Which is either the most secure thing I've heard a producer say, or the most stubborn. Standing on Bricco Boschis, those turn out to be the same thing.
