Nothing Compares—
Some sick Bordeaux wines you need & pre-code women.
Last Thursday I went to the Vinous Icons Bordeaux dinner. And I whittled down two amazing wines you need in your life…
First off:
2011 Troplong-Mondot from Bordeaux
You can grab HERE for $110/bottle
or a 3 pack for $99/bottle (you should share)
Perched at the top of Saint-Émilion on limestone, Troplong has always had a quiet swagger chock full of dark fruit, espresso, truffle, and a mineral spine. 2011 was a very human year (we’ll get into this more below through Neal’s lens): a devastating tsunami in Japan, Adele cracking the world open with “Someone Like You,” and the feminist comedy, Bridesmaids, reminded everyone that women too can poop in their pants. For me, in Bordeaux, it is a year for classic claret albeit not as hyped or priced as the more famous 2009s and 2010s. And when from a serious estate like Troplong, and fifteen years in, the tannins have softened, the fruit has settled into earth and tobacco, and it’s in a solid drinking window, especially with a proper ribeye or côte de boeuf. I found this at a slightly crazy price, and there are only a few bottles left: this is the moment to be smart, skip the flashy vintage, and buy the 2011 that’s actually ready.
& the second wine is wild rare, there are only THREE magnums available - this is for paid subscribers only, down below the paywall. First come, first serve!
Last Thursday I was lucky to be seated next to Neal Martin. Neal’s vintage reports are clever and fun to read, and he is even more charming in person. He arrived in an orange-red WAX London coat which turned out to perfectly match the cover of his new book he’d brought along: The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide, from 1870 to 2024, now in its second edition.
No one in their right mind would pick up a book about 154 years of wine vintages, but that’s the thing about Neal, he’s clever about this sort of thing. For each year he doesn’t just give you the wine. He gives you what else was happening. The film of the year. The song. The one event everyone alive at the time would remember. He makes the wine the thing that anchors a year, not the whole year itself.
I flipped to 1990, my birth year. The historic event he cited was Tim Berners-Lee inventing the internet, which right now feels pretty meta as I write this using said invention. The film that year was Cyrano de Bergerac with the G himself - Gérard Depardieu. I looked up from the page and told whoever was near me that Cyrano was one of the first plays I read that really stuck with me in high school, I was thoroughly convinced no one would ever love me properly, and that unrequited love, the tragedy of a man who can only say true things through someone else’s mouth, it landed somewhere that took years to identify. The song for 1990 was Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U, which inevitably lead to quite a few of us breaking into, nu-THING compares, nu-THING compares, to YOUUU!!! Naturally! This play, this song, these things deeply resonate with people. They make you feel, which is also what the best sort of wines do.
I kept turning that over in my head through the weekend. On Friday night I put on Criterion and fell into something I had no idea existed as a genre: pre-code Hollywood. These were films made after the silents and before the Hays Code took effect in 1934, which essentially meant that movies were censored for decades by a set of rules drafted by a Catholic priest paid an exorbitant amount of money. Movies back then showed interracial relationships, same-sex affairs, women chain smoking and doing drugs, people challenging the government and religion, nudity, and well - things that were actually happening in America, in real life.
The film was Three on a Match, 1932. It tells the story of a woman running from a good marriage, a wealthy husband, a young son — straight into addiction, a lover, and eventually her own child’s kidnapping. On screen. In 1932. But that part isn’t even what got me. What got me was that the whole film is built around three women who are drawn as actual people. Friends from girlhood into their thirties, each of them flawed in specific and unrepeatable ways, none of them positioned as a lesson or a warning or a symbol of anything. They drank too much, made terrible decisions, went to prison, were imperfect mothers. They were just women. I have watched a lot of cinema from the decades that followed and have rarely seen women as multi-dimensional.
A lot of these films are forgotten, but not by Neal - who references Public Enemy in his debriefing of 1931. One thinks that gangster films were invented around The Godfather or Goodfella’s - but that was over forty years later! Pre-code Hollywood set the standard for the whole genre, which would go on to become censored for decades as the Hays Code warned against sympathy for criminals, theft, robbery, firearms, etc. etc.
Films and wines can make you feel things, the way an ear worm of a song can make you feel seventeen again (while at a dinner table in your thirties), surrounded by people you’d just met, all of you singing. It’s all just attempts to say: this is what it felt like. This particular year. I was here.
Nu-THING compares.
FOR SUBSCRIBERS
A rare allocation, offered to this list only, just a few bottles remain.
See below…
