Five Cappellano Baroli with Piedmont inspired cuisine
Tasted Sunday, May 25, 2014 by David Paris (dbp) with 708 views
Introduction
Leading up to our trip to Italy (including a visit at Cappellano), I had this idea to do a five course Piedmont inspired dinner to go along with 5 different Cappellano Baroli. Ken and I both had purchased some of these wines so it was a great opportunity to explore them together. We decanted all five wines once they arrived, so the first had been decanting for about an hour once we began in on them, and the latter ones a few hours. 
I spent a few weeks leading up to the dinner trying to find interesting dishes... I've research most of the Piedmont cookbooks I could find and bought a few and none of them are all that great. There also weren't too many interesting things I could find online. Perhaps Piedmont food is just uninteresting? *shrug* I'm kidding, but it's interesting the lack of quality books. I suppose I'll find out when we head there in a few weeks. The first course certainly was interesting, though... a raw sheep heads mushroom salad with white truffles, anchovies, egg yolk and olive oil. It was quite tasty.
Flight 1 (1 Note)
Flight 2 (2 Notes)
Next course was a lovely artichoke heart with a diced boiled egg, parmesan, and anchovies. Perhaps our favorite dish of the night, with some very interesting flavors. 
The following course I failed to photograph, but another favorite was the Spinach and risotto soup. Lovely stuff.
Flight 3 (2 Notes)
For the main we did Rabbit Asti style... basically, a Barolo braised rabbit. For this you need an entire bottle of Barolo in the pot (I chose not to use a bottle of Cappellano, though!):
Unfortunately the dish was rather bland, and pretty much looked like hell. Just no color at all. Fail... won't be doing that again. We served it with Asparagus with Fontina cheese and anchovies.
Closing
Lastly, for dessert, another full bottle of Barolo went into Barolo poached pears with marscapone cheese... unfortunately while good, the pear tasted nothing like Barolo:
Overall I must say that I was surprised by the wines... on the whole, they seemed a bit more "dialed up" than I expected... higher fruit content (which was nice), but also higher octane with some heat coming through on most of the wines. While they're in the 14.5% range as most other Barolos are these days, I somehow found the alcohol more noticeable here. There is definitely something quite lovely about the aromatics of these wines, but I am quite curious to see how they all evolve. I have a case of both of the 2006s, so I will be able to monitor them over the coming years... though it'll likely be 5-10 years before I pop the next one! 
2003 Cappellano Barolo Pie Franco Otin Fiorin (Gabutti) 89 Points
Italy, Piedmont, Langhe, Barolo
This wine looked totally different from all the others... very brown, dark, and baked looking. Kind of thin, too. The aromas were very odd for a "young" Barolo, but it is 2003, after all. Stewed, almost oxidized notes dominate. If I try, some tart, light red fruits are present too. The palate texture is on thee thinner side and the flavors are quite lean, tart, and tannic. The body is fairly smooth, but there's just not much there. Really nice dial up of acid on the finish, though. Quite puckering and lean, in fact. There's a slight bit of dried fruits here and light, fresh raspberries. Overall this wine is already feeling a little bit tired. The only interesting part of it was the finish, and otherwise it's seeming too much affected by the heat of the vintage. I don't see this improving from here (amazing for such a young wine), but so it goes in '03.
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