The Map Everyone Misreads

Bricco Boschis isn't on the Ratti map.

This has bothered people on Cavallotto's behalf for decades. The map is the reference. Renato Ratti drew it in the seventies, it named the great vineyards, and it has shaped how the region is understood ever since. If your hill isn't on it, the assumption is that somebody looked at your hill and decided.

Alfio's explanation is different, and he gives it calmly, as though it were obvious.

He says the map records which grapes you could buy at the Monforte market. An inventory of what was on offer, rather than a judgement about soil. Cavallotto's fruit was never on offer. They had been vinifying all of it themselves since the forties. Nothing left the hill as grapes, so nothing appeared.

I don't know whether he's right. It isn't how the map is usually described, and I'm not the person to settle it.

What interests me is the sixty years.

Sixty years of being absent from the most quoted document in Barolo, and the family response was to keep making the wine. No campaign. No letter to the editor. It only came up because I asked, and he answered it the way you'd answer a question about the weather.

There's a version of this story where they were wronged.

Alfio doesn't tell that version.

Bricco Boschis in Castiglione Falletto is a Cavallotto monopole. The family began vinifying its own fruit in the 1940s and released its first Barolo under the Cavallotto label in 1948. Renato Ratti's map of Barolo's historic crus was drawn in the 1970s and remains a standard reference for the region.