TN: 1982 Château Trotanoy

[Baby Chickpea]

1982 Château Trotanoy (Pomerol)
You know that great scene in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (pilfered from Proust’s À la récherché du temps perdu) where Charles Foster Kane reminisces about that strikingly beautiful woman he saw for one fleeting moment boarding a ferry one random day and how not a day went by right through to his old age when he didn’t think of that unknown woman? Well, ever since first drinking the 82 Trotanoy in the early 90s, I don’t think a week has gone by without me thinking about what is to me one of my all-time favourite wines. Last had in February 2004 (Valentines Day – “best wine I have ever had” according to my partner who has tried great vintage first growths), and in August last year with the equally prodigious 82 Certan-de-May at Adelaide’s exceptional The Grange Restaurant, it was time to rekindle my love affair with this special wine. Light red with some brown edges. Bouquet is lush with meaty aromas, fleshy, sensual, perfumed with blackcurrant sweetness and some aged cigar-box and cedar. Palate is elegant but concentrated, long and mind-blowingly harmonious. Beautiful structure. Like a dreamily slow, subtle and contemplative film by Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson or Andrei Tarkovsky. Again my thoughts are “what a *&^%$#@ great wine”. A class wine in every respect – hard to believe a wine can get any better. More powerful, concentrated, long-lived yes. But rarely so impeccably and astonishingly balanced as in 82 for Trotanoy. So much exoticism, suppleness and silky sensual fruit in a holistic, seamless entity. Everything is near perfect and I don’t care what anyone says – this remains one of my all-time favourite wines. And this kills the 66 Latour and 83 Margaux I had recently. If one wants to understand pure balance in wine, this is the quintessential wine. Gosh, what will I do when I run out of my last three bottles? Awesome Grand Vin.
96/100

[Neville K]

Danny
I was thinking farcanal, some pretty serious lazy drops pass your lips and your tender friend's. Rosebud, or rose is there any word sweeter? Nineteen, perhaps. But I digress.

Such lush cinematic description had me momentarily transported until I was jolted in a manner like a plane going down and the air masks dangling from the bulkhead: Andrei Tarkovsky. I thought of The Stalker and the cinematic torture in the name of art, of watching a wretched soul creep towards a fence for what seems an eternity to the incessant drip drip drip of water. Cinema for true masochists only. Water and cinema torture wrapped up in one.

To use the water analogy: Trotanoy 82 is the surfer's perfect barrel.
Don't leave us quaesy, Danny. Eric Rohmer if you must.

Cheers
Neville K

[Grant]

Youse intellectchools yuse rooly big words.......wots this about sum Russian winemaker?

[Baby Chickpea]

How very true of Tarkovsky and water. Like time standing still, as in my two favourites, Andrei Rublev and the Mirror. No one said it better than Pauline Kael (paraphrasing): "there is nothing in cinema more beautiful than a Tarkovsky film in which one of his characters takes half an hour to contemplatively walk across the screen". Or as in the Mirror, when the mother takes 10 minutes to walk to her front fence amid the lush green waving grass, or the 30 minute drive-in-the-tunnel sequence in Solaris that comes from nowhere, or the 10 minute burning tree in The Sacrifice, the 5 minute real-time tolling of the giant bell in Rublev, or when the Stalker finally enetrs The Zone - the camera lingers for what seems an eternity, shaping the characters emotional resonance, in what turns out to be ...a dead end? heaven? vacuum? Who knows. Rarely has cinema reached such artistic contemplative peaks, the antithesis to Rohmer's (best exemplified by my 2 faves Claire's Knee or My Naight with Maud) lightness of touch, and focus on the banal and minutae of life.

PS - there is a great Australian-based website for solid criticism of film and film directors - www.sensesofcinema.com. Worth a look.

[lantana]

How very true of Tarkovsky and water. Like time standing still, as in my two favourites, Andrei Rublev and the Mirror. No one said it better than Pauline Kael (paraphrasing): "there is nothing in cinema more beautiful than a Tarkovsky film in which one of his characters takes half an hour to contemplatively walk across the screen". Or as in the Mirror, when the mother takes 10 minutes to walk to her front fence amid the lush green waving grass, or the 30 minute drive-in-the-tunnel sequence in Solaris that comes from nowhere, or the 10 minute burning tree in The Sacrifice, the 5 minute real-time tolling of the giant bell in Rublev, or when the Stalker finally enetrs The Zone - the camera lingers for what seems an eternity, shaping the characters emotional resonance, in what turns out to be ...a dead end? heaven? vacuum? Who knows. Rarely has cinema reached such artistic contemplative peaks, the antithesis to Rohmer's (best exemplified by my 2 faves Claire's Knee or My Naight with Maud) lightness of touch, and focus on the banal and minutae of life.

PS - there is a great Australian-based website for solid criticism of film and film directors - www.sensesofcinema.com. Worth a look.

Yeah, couldn't agree more with what you just said, those old Tom & Jerry's are tops too!

lantana

[Guest]

How very true of Tarkovsky and water. Like time standing still, as in my two favourites, Andrei Rublev and the Mirror. No one said it better than Pauline Kael (paraphrasing): "there is nothing in cinema more beautiful than a Tarkovsky film in which one of his characters takes half an hour to contemplatively walk across the screen". ....

My point was that just when we were vicariously enjoying what must have been a wonderful vinous experience in the petit Phoenician delicacy household you had to spoil at all with a reference to Tarkovsky.

Let me explain as it may seem riddled with hypocrisy. I can be enthralled by a gripping test match draw, as opposed to the banality of one day tippety -run cricket. Thirty hours of play and no result. This in global terms is weird. Yet a nil-all draw in the "world's" game, soccer is a form of Butoh on steroids. I just don't get it. I don't get Butoh either.

I have tried in the past to tape the Ashes overnight and watch it the next day. But I fast -forward, thinking only the action will matter. I want to get to the result. No. The whole zen of cricket is its real time- its inherent contemplation and build up of pressure. Subleties like fine field adjustments; mid-pitch discussions, rubbing of the ball -watch Shane Warne; facial expressions are all part of the action.

I don't like watching paint dry. I hate waiting for the kettle to boil. I won't tolerate anthing less than pipe broadband internet. I want it now.

I can watch La Belle Noiseuse and 4 hours does not seem long (the mostly naked, luscious and luminous Emanuelle Beart may in part be the reason, but one can get swept away by the mis en scene) so I am forgiving of time and story. I more than get Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy. I think they're great.


But please Danny and Pauline, with great respect, I most profoundly disagree. Tarkovksy is a shocker: a film maker of self-indulgent, grotesque banality. But every one has a breaking point and hopefully a bullsh*t threshold, and if Andrei Tarkovsky made wines like he made films they would be riddled with Brettanomyces among other barnyard atrocities. His films stink.

The Stalker synopsis: A man is in a field and he tries to get to the fence. It is taking him ages. We hear a tap dripping. No one comes to fix it. Will someone please turn off the bloody tap! No one does. Mate do you want to go to the fence or not. He can't decide. We watch him crawl. Nothing happens. The tap never gets fixed.The end.

You just lost 3 hours of your life and you paid for the pain of it.

When I am squirming in my seat yearning to walk out of the cinema ( but getting with the programme) thoughts only as to how in Soviet Russia could such film stock be wantonly wasted, I do not get a character's existential pain and anomie. I just get a pain in the bum.


I have had Trotanoy 82 but only in its youth, after about 6 years and it was a precociously, plump, velvety and minerally delight. I envy you for tasting it closer to its peak. But please don't spoil the fun with images of torture.

Clearly no cinemaphile, Neville k

[Baby Chickpea]

Oh Neville, what would you make of Tarkovsky's major influence Bergman? Yet you like Rivette, an even more indulgent director? Sure, I can live ith Beart (who can't?) but just how self-indulgent and pretentious can one get with Out 1, Out 1: Spectre, Paris nous appartient (awful) or L'Amour fou? Sure La religeuse is beautiful (in part because it is short and derived from literary source) but ... Or Warhol? Or Tarkovsky's muse, Theo Angelopolous? There is no pain in Tarkovsky, only insight (albeit esoteric), rigorous technique and aesthetic wonder. A master film-maker (although it may pain you to hear this).

[Neville K]

Oh Neville, what would you make of Tarkovsky's major influence Bergman? ...There is no pain in Tarkovsky, only insight (albeit esoteric), rigorous technique and aesthetic wonder. A master film-maker (although it may pain you to hear this).

Danny.
I am so glad you didn't use the word auteur. I could feel it coming on, but you held back. I think I might have felt an involuntary movement [insert vomit emoticon] The cliche of auteurism is as bandied as the word "masterpiece". See you didn't call Trotanoy 82 a masterpiece, but the Temple of Kael readily calls obscurantist independent works masterpieces. You might have fallen prey to the cult.

Hmm, all these dark souls inhabiting places with no winter sun. Perhaps you could discuss pyschological terroir. Eisenstein and Alexander Rodchenko can show the redemptive qualities of the lens in Russia, but the Russian sensibility is often opaque to simpler folk who grow up in the land of surf, sun and SMS scandals.

You are fully with the programme. It is a tough gig looking at seminal tracking shots in the history of cinema in a wintry cinematheque with 30 other black clad denizens huddling together watching a battle sequence of a 1925 black and white film. Did you see the swirling camera movement in Potemkin, one rhetorically asks.

And for those who thought this was a wine forum, Pauline Kael, RIP was born in Petaluma (California) and she had some not bad quotes:

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects what's the point?
A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.
One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic.

Cheers,
now must put my footy tips in
Neville k

[Neville K]

It's Melbourne International Film Festival Time.

Seen any good wines/films?
Neville K

[Waiters Friend]

In very simple terms, and without having tasted the wine,

With that voluptuous description, why did it only score 96 points?

[griff]

In very simple terms, and without having tasted the wine,

With that voluptuous description, why did it only score 96 points?

Danny is a harder marker than most. I have seen higher points from him though (Only answering as I'm not sure if Danny visits here that often anymore )

cheers

Carl

[bacchaebabe]

Year to date, this thread gets my vote for thread of the year. How did I miss this initially?

[Michael McNally]

An old thread dragged to the surface like a chest of sunken treasure.

[Neville K]

Michael.

Good wine does gladden the heart.

Did you mean: Bonum Vinum Laetificat Cor Hominis ?

[Michael McNally]

Yes I did. Thank you Neville. Interesting that I hadn't noticed in the years I have used it on this board (others were too polite to point it out, perhaps).

As an aside, I believe this is an historical typographical error of the kind often made in Roman times. The u and i keys on Roman typewriters were pretty close together (and they remain so today in a form of homage to classical clerical staff). Yet again, history repeats itself.

Thanks

Michael

[bacchaebabe]

Doh, I wasn't looking at the years when I said that. I don't think I did miss it the first time around, after all. 2005 is a long time ago!