In Old ‘Dry Diggings,’ A New Way To Engage Wine

During April – Earth Month – expect to read and hear a lot about how the wine trade is responding to climate change and softening its impact on the environment.

More by coincidence than strategy, however, one seasoned winemaker is taking on those issues in an unusually personal, daring and quiet way.

After two years of patient and precise hands-on preparation, Marco Cappelli and his wife Belinda have opened the micro-winery Cappelli Wine.

It is a mind-boggling departure from the way wine brands generally are founded. For one, Cappelli Wine occupies really tiny quarters, a circa-1895 structure that over generations has housed businesses ranging from meat market to newspaper, gothic antiques store to crystal shop.

The Cappellis made over the space handsomely, with a new tongue-and-grove ceiling of Douglas fir, Murano-glass sconces, riddling racks, corked walls and paintings by the late Napa Valley artist Ira Yeager. They kept, however, a door whose etched glass continues to testify to one of the building’s earlier uses as a law office.

Cappelli Wine is in downtown Placerville, an old Gold Rush mining camp known early on as Dry Diggings and Hangtown. Cappelli Wine is far from any vineyard, squeezed along a narrow and sloping Main Street busy with traditional small-town businesses like hardware store, news stand, restaurants, bookshop, bars.

It is just down the street from the town’s old soda works, where a Gold Rush entrepreneur tapped a freshwater spring in the hill behind the building, bottled the water and sold it to miners. Cappelli Wine is both spiritual and practical heir to that history.

Where Cappelli Wine departs most sharply from other wineries is in the intimacy and inventiveness of its wine marketing.

On any given day, Cappelli Wine will have on hand six wines, with the selection revolving frequently in keeping with the couple’s focus on small-batch, single-vineyard releases. The wines are in kegs, each connected to a tap for dispensing into glass or bottle.

Cappelli starts each day with a couple of cases of each wine already bottled, but this is the game plan likely to captivate most wine enthusiasts: The adventurous visitor strolls in, takes a seat and opts for the tasting flight – 1.5 ounces of each of the day’s six wines for $5. The selection the other day included a fragrant and citric 2022 Chenin Blanc from Clarksburg, a light, spicy, quaffable and surprisingly persistent 2021 Pinot Noir from Calaveras County, and a brilliant, lush and animated 2021 Petite Sirah from nearby Fair Play. Cappelli is getting all his fruit from within a 90-minute drive of Placerville, a plan that provides him with ample opportunity to take advantage of a wide range of choice vineyards, helps him restrain prices for consumers, and lightens his winery’s impact on the environment.

Let’s say the customer is especially keen on the Petite Sirah and wants to take home a bottle or two. He or she steps up to one of the two banks of dispensers, is given an empty bottle, gives it a blast of nitrogen to flush out oxygen, and then sticks its neck into the appropriate spigot. The filled bottle is then corked and its neck shrink wrapped. The wine will cost $16, but the bottle is reusable, and when the customer returns to get it refilled he or she gets $2 credit, dropping the price for the Petite Sirah to $14.

That’s the protocol for five of the six wines on tap, their original price ranging from $12 to $16 per bottle. The exception is Cappelli’s non-vintage Mission

Angelica, his intricate and refined take on California’s most historic style of wine, rarely made these days, though he long has been an Angelica specialist. His Angelica is made with grapes from 140-year-old Mission vines at Fiddletown in neighboring Amador County, and is tawny-toned, luxuriant, sweet and shot through with suggestions of toffee, chocolate, smoke and nuts. It is a wine for sipping and deliberation. It costs $40 for a 500-mililiter bottle, $38 to refill.

Marco Cappelli began mulling over this clever concept 15 years ago, with a growing environmental consciousness just one of his motivations. Another was a longing to make good wine readily affordable. He likes to hang out in Europe, enjoying the ease of sauntering into a wine bar for a casual glass of wine at an attractive price. “In Italy, I was sure to find a local wine, a wine that represented the terroir of the place, and it would always be reasonably priced. You could afford to drink it every day,” says Cappelli. “I am determined to make the wine affordable so you can drink it every day. I don’t want it to be the most expensive thing on the table. That should be the lobster or the rib-eye.”

The Cappellis had to be inventive and flexible to launch the business. They learned, for one, that the best and only bottle they would use would be dead-leaf green in color and traditional Burgundian in shape. The faint color of the glass and the bottle’s gently sloping shoulders helps customers who want to fill their own bottles clearly see the wine flowing into and up the bottle.

They use one standard set of front and back labels, the front label simply stating Cappelli Wine, the back label simply stating “California Grape Wine.” The alcohol content is given as 14.1 percent, a declaration that by federal standards can cover an actual spread from 13.35 percent alcohol to 14.85 percent alcohol, well within Cappelli’s customary goals. (The exception is the Angelica, which Cappelli began to make and bottle under his own label long before the opening of the micro-winery; it weighs in at 18.4 percent alcohol.)

How then is a customer to remember what wine is in each bottle? This could be the most clever adaptation of all by the couple: Instead of a traditional cork, which would require a whole other piece of equipment, the Cappellis top each bottle with a “bar top,” a short cork shank attached to a wide cap for easy pulling and replacing. The top of each bar top, in turn, is branded with vintage, varietal and appellation. Then the cap is sealed onto the neck with shrink wrap.

Cappelli makes just a small portion of the wines on the premises. His back-room space is tight, and he long has had access to all the equipment he needs at nearby Miraflores Winery, one of several clients for whom he consults along the Sierra foothills and in the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta. Thus, Miraflores is where he makes most of his wines.

Stylistically, the wines under Cappelli Wine are meant for early consumption rather than long-term aging, though they vary markedly in weight and punch, a range he ultimately may narrow, depending on consumer response. After being open little more than a week, he is finding that about 75 percent of the clientele is local residents, and that they are leaning toward his medium-bodied red wines, which includes a meaty 2020 Fair Play Barbera as well as the Pinot Noir and the Petite Sirah. He makes only three or four barrels of each wine, and expects to fold in one or two new releases each month.

Since he began to establish his credentials as a focused and sensitive winemaker at Swanson Vineyards in Napa Valley three decades ago, Cappelli has been respected for wines that while true to place and variety in their transparency and expression also have been readily accessible for consumption upon release.

That aspiration likely will remain steady in Placerville, but what has changed is his intent to also stress value in his releases. In the past, particularly in Napa Valley, he has made wines that have been dear, priced $100 or so, but releases of his own brand will be far down the price scale. “When I was making wine for $100 a bottle I always had to talk it up. I had to make it seem precious,” he recalls. “Here, I want to make wines that show the character of the vineyard, that are balanced, that offer value, whose price I don’t have to justify. It’s liberating.”

Cappelli had made wine for Swanson Vineyards for 17 years when in 2004 he jolted the wine trade by packing up and leaving Napa Valley for remote and isolated Fair Play, an area more recognized for cattle than Cabernet, but where two years earlier he had bought the acclaimed Herbert Vineyard. He and his family settled into Fair Play, adapted to rural living, and grappled with all the challenges of growing grapes (drought, freeze, wildland fire, unpredictable shifts in the market) until 2021, when they sold the spread and moved into Placerville, plans for their micro-winery already under way.

Their last harvest at their home ranch may have been their most memorable. That was the summer of the Caldor Fire, which swept through the area, destroying homes, endangering vineyards and forcing the Cappellis to evacuate for three weeks. Thus, when he lifts a glass of the plush and clean 2021 Petite Sirah from what then was the family vineyard he wistfully refers to it as his “swan song.”

But only in reference to that wine. Cappelli Wine is newly launched, just the latest chapter in his several contributions to the state’s wine culture. Whether the couple’s business plan pans out remains to be seen, but the concept, with its emphasis on sustainability, local sourcing, value pricing and novel engagement just could appeal to wine consumers, especially younger, environmentally concerned potential customers that the wine trade is struggling to secure.

“I think I can make money at this, but I don’t know yet,” says Cappelli, off to greet another visitor drifting in off Main Street.

(Cappelli Wines, 484 Main St., Placerville, is open 1 p.m.-6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 1 p.m.-8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 1-5 p.m. Sundays, except for this coming Sunday, Easter, when it will be closed. A website is under development.)