GEYSERVILLE, Calif. - Movie director and entrepreneur Francis Ford Coppola bought this bucolic, gently terraced Sonoma County winery in 2006, with plans to diversify the property by offering some resort-like features. Some of those new features premiered in late July; others are among the coming attractions for late fall.
My wife and I got a preview of this work-in-progress at a press luncheon yesterday, followed by a walk-around with Sally Srok, Vice President, Hospitality, at Francis Ford Coppola Winery. The place is good now; it's going to get better.
Falling under the corporate umbrella of Francis Ford Coppola Presents LLC, the winery - which is open daily from 11 a.m. during the current renovation - is located in Sonoma's Alexander Valley, a prime wine-making spot. It's across the ridge from Napa Valley, where Coppola has been making wine at his Rubicon Estate for some time. The expanding winery doesn't have overnight lodging like some of the great bodegas we experienced in Mendoza, Argentina's prime wine country, but it is blossoming with just about everything else.
I have been watching Coppola's work on screen from "You're A Big Boy Now,'' made in 1966 at the beginning of his career, to "Tetro,'' his recent shot-in-Argentina family drama, which marks an artistically satisfying return to personal filmmaking for him. I was initially skeptical of Coppola's wine-making efforts, partly because making wine can be more a hobby than a serious business for stars who glitter in other fields, and partly because I'd sampled some of the lower-end Coppola wines and thought they were just OK.
After tasting high-end Coppola vintages with Corey Beck, director of winemaking, however, I am revising my opinion upward. These are very good wines, and Rustic, the first of the winery's two restaurants, dishes fresh, seasonal, sustainable, Italian-inspired food that matches up nicely with the wine. The Rustic staff say the director, himself, tasted every dish before it went on the menu. The view from the Rustic terrace isn't too shabby either, allowing a visitor's eye to sweep over lovely vineyards bordered by fruit-bearing olive trees.
If you know northern California's famous wine country, you know that the small town of Geyserville is a long drive for most visitors, being some 90 minutes north of San Francisco, farther out than better-known places. Getting people there - and getting them to stick around a while - is one reason Coppola is diversifying the property. A handsome new hillside visitors' center opened last month. A new Pool Cafe with its own menu, swimming pool and cabins, is scheduled for late fall. Bocce ball courts, outdoor game boards, picnic tables and a performing-arts pavilion are also under construction. Husband-and-wife Francis and Eleanor Coppola intend the destination to be family-friendly, Sally Srok explained, giving visitors of all ages something fun to do.
If you are a fan of Francis Coppola's movies - among them, classics like ''The Godfather'' I and II and "The Conversation,'' and near-classics such as "Apocalypse Now'' - you'll enjoy, as we did, checking out the movie memorabilia on display in the main building. It includes typewritten scripts, posters, the hand-written cast list for the original "Godfather,'' costumes, wigs - and, perhaps best of all, the ornate desk and leather chair that Marlon Brando used in the first "Godfather.'' There are also items from Sophia Coppola's films, such as the enchanting tone-poem "Lost in Translation,'' her 2004 fish-out-of-water tale of two lost American souls in Tokyo - set partly in one of the world's great hotels, the Park Hyatt Tokyo.
At lunch yesterday, we enjoyed a 2008 Chardonnay, an artfully blended 2007 red, wittily called Director's Cut, and especially a 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon, named Archimedes, after one of Francis Coppola's uncles and the famous mathematician of antiquity. Retailing for $50, Archimedes is made in limited production and is available only at the winery shop. Robust but subtle, with good fruit, good tannins and a purple, inky color not unlike Argentine Malbecs, it's good value considering its high quality - and a killer match for a good steak.
Francis Ford Coppola Winery is located at 300 Via Archimedes, Geyserville, CA 95441, just off U.S. Highway 101 at the Independence Lane exit. Toll-free tel. 877.590.3299. Web: http://www.franciscoppolawinery.com/.
Showing posts with label Francis Ford Coppola. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Francis Ford Coppola. Show all posts
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Coppola's "Tetro', and Argentina
It took me a while to catch up with Francis Ford Coppola's "Tetro,'' released last year and regarded by both its boosters and detractors as a return to edgy, experimental filmmaking. The feature film, shot with digital cameras on location in Argentina - namely, Buenos Aires and Patagonia - is beautiful to look at, has a knotty emotional core, rides on the success of strong acting and effortlessly evokes the texture and mood of Argentina.
My wife and I visited Argentina (and Chile, and Uruguay) in late 2007, and the movie brings it all back. "Tetro'' is far from a travelogue, yet feels so much like Argentina, I felt I could crawl inside the frame and be right there among the noctural city cafes and broken sidewalks, chilling out with the street characters and trolling the quasi-industrial cityscapes of La Boca, the gritty central-city district where the movie was filmed. Us, we stayed in Palermo, an up-and-coming neighborhood of restaurants, bars, shops and artisans, where Coppola maintained an office during the making of the movie. It was big local news in Buenos Aires when someone broke into the filmmaker's office and made off with the laptop that held the script for "Tetro.''
All's well that ends well, though. The film is exciting, emotionally affecting, lovely to behold, shot mostly in lustrous black and white, with dialogue in English and Spanish. It wanders a bit off course in the last half-hour with an operatic embrace of "family.'' The title character, Tetro - a blocked American writer, played by Vincent Gallo as Mr. Intensity, reinventes himself when he flees New York for Buenos Aires; he is a member of a very fractured family, indeed. "Tetro'' the movie has so many strengths, its weaknesses must be forgiven. Moreover, "Tetro'' boasts a confident performance by 20-year-old newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, who looks like a younger Leonardo DiCaprio and radiates ambition behind the baby fat. Maribel Verdu, as Tetro's wife and former therapist, turns in an assured, honed performance.
A bit of the film was shot in Patagonia, where, alas, I have yet to go. Seeing the sun glinting off the region's glaciers - massive, pearl-white, craggy - is enough to convince me to take a road trip there, as Coppola's characters do toward the end of the movie. Coppola, now 70, with the energy of a much younger man, directed and wrote the script. It is his first original screenplay since his brilliant "The Conversation'' during his golden age: the 1970s.
Most critics have applauded Coppola's artistic courage and return to form; the film makes few concessions to Hollywood or anyone's idea of easy commercialism. My old pal and former colleague Michael Sragow, the Baltimore Sun's lead movie critic, observed that Coppola made the film the way Elia Kazan would have done it: "This film's hypnotic, tremulous black and white makes you feel as if his camera lens refracts emotion and light simultaneously.'' Peter Howell, writing in the Toronto Sun, had a nice turn of phrase, too: "Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. films in luscious widescreen monochrome that looks almost wet.''
This movie shares little of the well-made if conventional narrative arc of Coppola's classic "Godfather'' movies or "The Conversation,'' but "Tetro'' does something else they did: It makes you care about movies, makes you want to think and talk about what you see in them. And, for me, it makes me want to go back to Argentina, too, pronto.
My wife and I visited Argentina (and Chile, and Uruguay) in late 2007, and the movie brings it all back. "Tetro'' is far from a travelogue, yet feels so much like Argentina, I felt I could crawl inside the frame and be right there among the noctural city cafes and broken sidewalks, chilling out with the street characters and trolling the quasi-industrial cityscapes of La Boca, the gritty central-city district where the movie was filmed. Us, we stayed in Palermo, an up-and-coming neighborhood of restaurants, bars, shops and artisans, where Coppola maintained an office during the making of the movie. It was big local news in Buenos Aires when someone broke into the filmmaker's office and made off with the laptop that held the script for "Tetro.''
All's well that ends well, though. The film is exciting, emotionally affecting, lovely to behold, shot mostly in lustrous black and white, with dialogue in English and Spanish. It wanders a bit off course in the last half-hour with an operatic embrace of "family.'' The title character, Tetro - a blocked American writer, played by Vincent Gallo as Mr. Intensity, reinventes himself when he flees New York for Buenos Aires; he is a member of a very fractured family, indeed. "Tetro'' the movie has so many strengths, its weaknesses must be forgiven. Moreover, "Tetro'' boasts a confident performance by 20-year-old newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, who looks like a younger Leonardo DiCaprio and radiates ambition behind the baby fat. Maribel Verdu, as Tetro's wife and former therapist, turns in an assured, honed performance.
A bit of the film was shot in Patagonia, where, alas, I have yet to go. Seeing the sun glinting off the region's glaciers - massive, pearl-white, craggy - is enough to convince me to take a road trip there, as Coppola's characters do toward the end of the movie. Coppola, now 70, with the energy of a much younger man, directed and wrote the script. It is his first original screenplay since his brilliant "The Conversation'' during his golden age: the 1970s.
Most critics have applauded Coppola's artistic courage and return to form; the film makes few concessions to Hollywood or anyone's idea of easy commercialism. My old pal and former colleague Michael Sragow, the Baltimore Sun's lead movie critic, observed that Coppola made the film the way Elia Kazan would have done it: "This film's hypnotic, tremulous black and white makes you feel as if his camera lens refracts emotion and light simultaneously.'' Peter Howell, writing in the Toronto Sun, had a nice turn of phrase, too: "Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. films in luscious widescreen monochrome that looks almost wet.''
This movie shares little of the well-made if conventional narrative arc of Coppola's classic "Godfather'' movies or "The Conversation,'' but "Tetro'' does something else they did: It makes you care about movies, makes you want to think and talk about what you see in them. And, for me, it makes me want to go back to Argentina, too, pronto.
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