One of the many memorable moments from the Baldo Cappellano visit was the way he--witht perfect timing-- fractured the French verb to spit (cracher). “Do want to scratch?” He asked us. He is such a twinkle-in- the-eye guy, he had to know that he was being adorable.

Wine maker and jokester, Baldo has a kindly and wise Jimmy Carter-ish air to him. He makes barbera, nebbiolo, the famed quinined, barolo chinato and two very special barolos; one from American root-stocked, forty- year-old vines and the other from twenty-year- old, ungrafted rootstocked vines. This last is bottled as Pie Franco.

Cappellano frequently peppers his speech with analogy. Conversation flowed along with the 'scratching' in his cramped cellar. Eventually the talk turned from the Italian election, to plastic surgery and finally to sex and love (as it related to wine). “There are women you love and women you want to be the mother of your children,” he stated. “It is the same with wine.”

I turned this whore/Madonna complex (as it relates to wine) over in my brain. As someone who always opts for emotional intensity, if I were in the market for a mother for my children (no—that doesn’t work, but you know what I mean), it would be his “Pie Franco.” The conversation the wine gave to me was harder, deeper, more faceted. This one was the mother.

He continued on with the ‘there are two kinds’ of theme.

“There are two kinds of wines, wines of the heart and normal wines. For example, companies like Winebow cannot import Cappellano. But there still needs to be a Winebow. Look, up the road to Serralunga is Swiss man who has cows and sells milk. I love that milk, unpasturized, straight from the cow. But I can’t always get there. Sometimes I have to go to the supermarket. There has to be room for both kinds of milk and both kinds of wine. Here is the crime; industry pretends to be artisan and people believe them. This is the crime. Yes.”

On the Louis/Dressner website there is more Baldo and an in- depth discussion of the ungrafted rootstock issue. Do take a look. http://www.louisdressner.com/Cappellano/