Dan Garodnick

Jessica Lappin

Apple is drawing the Council’s 51 members in prom attire in a series called NYC High for the blog ANIMAL New York. So far, ANIMAL New York posted Council members in districts one through eight.

Each drawing is accompanied by a small score card that lists the neighborhoods they represent and several facts about their time on the Council.

“Politics is kind of like high school, with factions and gossip and people always trying to hold on to or increase their popularity,” Apple told ANIMAL.

Apple contributed to a similar project in which artists drew Chicago’s 50 aldermen.

Here are Apple’s drawings of the two East Side Council members, Dan Garodnick and Jessica Lappin.

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Rep. Carolyn Maloney endorsed her fellow Manhattanite Eric Schneiderman in the attorney general primary. Schneiderman, a state senator from the Upper West Side, is running against four other attorney general candidates.

In Maloney’s endorsement statement, she praises Schneiderman for advocating on behalf of “working families.”

“Whether it’s fighting for women’s rights, economic justice or government reform, Eric has stood up for progressive values and delivered results for all New Yorkers,” Maloney said.

Meanwhile, in her own primary campaign, Maloney received the endorsement of the Uniformed Firefighters Association and the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. They cite her work on the 9/11 first responders and survivors health care bill.

Maloney’s opponent Reshma Saujani launched a website called TheRealCarolynMaloney.com.

The website features a video of Maloney speaking to an audience at a Cretan Association of New York event. The 20-second clip shows Maloney trying to answer a question from a woman in the audience who asked why she voted against a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, which sets monetary policy and regulates banking institutions. (A version of the legislation was put into the financial reform bill that Maloney voted for and was signed into law.)

As Maloney tries to answer, the question is repeated. Maloney starts to clap and asks the rest of the audience to do the same to drown out the woman in the audience so that she could answer. Her campaign says the hecklers were conservative activists and LaRouchites.

Saujani’s website invites visitors to take a quiz with loaded questions, such as whether a member of Congress should respond to your question by “mocking you in front of your neighbors?” or if you believe that elected officials should “tell the truth.”

Maloney’s campaign responded with this statement:

This is just another desperate campaign tactic from a candidate who is failing to gain traction and whose campaign has been criticized by independent organizations and newspapers. Voters in Manhattan and Queens know the real Carolyn Maloney and her record of standing up for consumers and fighting for working families.

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By Bette Dewing

Yup, a New York Times review’s claim that no one’s sensibilities would be offended by Eat Pray Love actually got me out to the movies. Except for a few offending words, I left the theater with a glow which made East 86th Street’s maddening crowds seem almost friendly. Do you ever miss the going-to-the-movie experience where your sensibilities weren’t offended and earplugs and deep pockets weren’t needed?

That glow faded on seeing subway construction fences crowding either side of 86th Street on Second Avenue. I’d just read 14th Congressional District Republican Candidate Dino LaVerghetti’s August 26th op-ed lament “Small-Businesses, The Forgotten Victims of Second Avenue.”

He talks about how with too little government help, so many of the affected small businesses in the area have closed since 2007. LaVerhgetti warns, “As it moves southward, the construction acts like a virtual Grim Reaper, felling everything in its path.”

Infinitely more could and must be done to save small businesses that in a 20/20-visioned world would be landmarked.

Meanwhile, the Home Depot invasion has felled 60-plus-year-old Thalco’s Hardware Store on Second near 76th Street, where this three-generation family business was headed by Jerry Cotler, who also owns the building. Cotler can’t help being rueful,

“Too many who now say how much they’ll miss us shopped a lot at Home Depot,” he said.

You know what we have to do to save our walking distance “everyday need-providers.” Their owners must organize and protest! Big time! The good news is Jerry will move to Florida where his closest relatives live. But, it’s more bad news for neighborhood survival.

Families of origin are the forgotten people in the Eat Pray Love heroine’s desperate search for post-divorce meaning. But that’s always been entertainment’s sin of omission, though a “fair and balanced” representation could not be more just, or more needed.

Dr. Martin J. Zion surely tried when he was rabbi of Temple of Israel of the City of New York. This excerpt is from his Aug. 10, 1980, homily, aired in this paper:

“Our fixation with personal autonomy has been psychologically devastating. The old, in their search for independence, end up alone. The young, isolating themselves from the old, in their yearning for freedom, end up confused, bewildered and depressed by problems which could have been handled so much better if aided by the older generation’s experience.’’

Amen! Blame all manner of social engineers; especially entertainment’s powerful pushing of potentially disabling generational divides.

Rabbi Zion lost his son on September 11 and, as we near that date, my thoughts are especially with the mothers, fathers, grandparents and siblings of those innocents whose lives were so brutally, sinfully, wickedly taken, especially those mourners with too little emotional support. Doubly wounded are those with little contact with their lost loved one’s children when the surviving parent remarries or moves away, either geographically or emotionally.

Mayor Bloomberg, himself a father, surely got this right: “Children who lose their parents are called orphans, bereaved spouses are called widows or widowers, but there is no name for those who lose a son or daughter, because this loss is a loss beyond words.”

And let Grandparents Day (September 12) not be one day of remembering in a year of forgetting. And never forget how human survival so greatly relates to Rabbi Zion’s impassioned belief, including the Fordham U study urging families to stay closely connected with off-to-college freshman boys, who keep their homesickness and other woes too much to themselves. So do men, in general. Beware of alcohol solace.

Rosh Hashanah Blessings to all!

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By Susan Braudy

Thank goodness muggings are pretty much a thing of my past. Some things are getting better—a lot better—in our town. My first mugging took place at dusk on the University of Pennsylvania campus. A man pushed a wad of dollar bills into my coat pocket after showing me the top $100 bill, then invited me back to his hotel room. When I refused, he pushed me down and kicked me toward an open car door.

I felt for the wad of bills in my pocket, pulled off the top bill and shoved the remaining wad up at him. The fat wad was missing its $100 cover, and was all $1 bills. Bewildered, he slowly checked each bill. I picked up my schoolbooks and ran away. In a way I mugged him back.

The second time I was mugged was after a Neil Simon play on Broadway. I stood in the back of the theater (cheap admission charge). After the first act, I always found a single seat down front.

While I walked to the subway on 42nd Street later that evening, a man grabbed my shoulder bag. I swerved into the traffic, dragging him until he let go of my bag. Was I brave or foolhardy?

The third time I was mugged I was talking on a payphone to my boss, the president of Warner Brothers Studios. An impatient man, he’d just reprimanded me for wasting his time with a quick joke. I felt a gentle tugging on my shoulder bag. I whirled around and saw a child with the sweetest brown eyes, his little hand in my pocketbook. My boss was shouting at me for some transgression. I was far more afraid of him than of the brown-eyed child.

“Stop that!” I whispered and smacked the child’s hand. His eyes looked hurt. He ran.

The fourth time I was mugged I was walking with an editor from the New York Times on West 58th Street. He handled arts critics for the paper and was known far and wide for his patience. Two guys in their twenties approached us. I noticed one of them was carrying a creased brown paper bag. He veered purposefully into my friend and we heard the crunch of breaking glass.

The bag holder began to whine.

“Look what you did. You broke three expensive bottles of pills and my mother is really sick. Now she’s going to die. I don’t know what to do. You owe me at least 20 bucks.”

I had one of my scary and unexpected adrenaline surges.

“See here” I said, “I’m going to report you to the police. You’re trying to rob us of—” My friend interrupted me and asked the dastardly duo, soothingly, “Are you sure it’s only $20 worth of medicine? I hope your mother gets better soon. Tell you what, I’ll give you $30 and my apologies.” I was sputtering as he took out his wallet and gave the two guys a $20 and a $10 bill.

The guys looked really embarrassed and slunk off. I guess that’s one of the reasons why my friend is an upper manager and I work alone. My mugging experiences have taught me an important lesson. I am far more afraid of what I will do to a potential mugger than what he or she will do to me.

You don’t know your own adrenaline switch until it’s been turned on several times.
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Susan Braudy is the author and journalist whose last book, Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, was nominated for a Pulitzer by publisher Alfred Knopf.

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I have a complaint that I think you will agree is a legitimate grumble. Let me set the scene. I read most of your stories but never miss your “Crime Watch” section, which covers assaults, thefts, robberies, petty crimes, etc. One unique feature of the section is that you never print the name of the person who allegedly committed the offense in your headlines. That is, until your Aug. 12 issue with the bold-faced “Guiliani’s Daughter Arrested” instead of something like “Young Lady Arrested,” which would have been the headline any other time.

I can only deduce that you used Caroline Giuliani as a foil to take a low, cheap shot at her father who was hailed throughout the land in 2001 as “America’s Mayor.” Or did you forget?

Joe Morrone
Upper East Side

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By Reshma Saujani

In my campaign, I’ve traveled from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side, from Astoria to Long Island City—and everywhere I go, I hear the same fundamental concern from voters: for the first time in generations, parents are worried their children will not have the same opportunities that they had. And more than anything, people in New York—from artists to taxi drivers to teachers to bankers—are anxious about the economy. They’re worried about a jobless recovery with no end in sight and politicians in Washington and Albany that are failing to act.

Compounding that anxiety are several factors. First, New York is one of the most expensive places to live in America. The overall cost of living here is an astonishing 364 percent higher than the national average—and it’s not getting any cheaper. The delayed and over-budget construction of the Second Avenue subway is pushing small businesses into bankruptcy. Upper East Side schools are overcrowded and students are being forced to go across town for a quality education. Public spaces like Ruppert Park may close, bus lines are being cut and bedbugs are a growing problem.

We can—and must—do better. In order to ensure a vibrant Upper East Side for future generations, we need new leadership and innovative ideas to create jobs, make sure that middle class families aren’t priced out of the city, and improve the quality of life for New Yorkers.

Right now, creating jobs must be our first priority, because the solutions coming out of Washington simply aren’t working. Carolyn Maloney, my opponent, has not passed a single piece of legislation to create jobs since becoming chair of the Joint Economic Committee. Not one. To create thousands of new jobs starting this year, I’ve proposed a new 21st Century Jobs Corps to provide educational training grants to help unemployed Americans, like construction workers, find work in emerging sectors. I’ve also proposed a National Innovation Fund—a public-private partnership to invest seed money into start-up businesses in next-generation industries. I believe we should eliminate capital gains taxes on investments in micro-enterprises to empower entrepreneurs with innovative new business ideas. And I am calling for a $15,000 student loan credit for math, science or engineering college graduates who go to work for a clean-tech, biotech or high-tech start-up in New York for at least three years. We should also double the $2 billion in grants awarded to our entrepreneurs through the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs.

Maintaining an affordable New York is critical, especially when it comes to housing. Only 30 percent of New Yorkers are homeowners, a far cry from the national rate of 68 percent, and people of color in New York are even less likely to own a home. New York must first take steps to mandate that a percentage of development projects be dedicated to affordable housing. In addition, I will push for a national Tenants’ Bill of Rights to protect homeowners and oppose plans to privatize public housing.

Quality of life is another important issue. I’m committed to maintaining our existing parks and public spaces and creating new ones. The completion of the East Side Greenway must be a priority. I’m also concerned about the potential construction of a high-rise at the Ruppert Playground on 92nd Street. I’ve written to both the City of New York and The Related Companies, urging them to permanently preserve this space as a public park.

Infrastructure will continue to be an important driver of economic growth, but the Second Avenue subway is an unfortunate reminder that when our leaders don’t properly consult the community, too often, businesses are adversely affected and many of our economic goals are not achieved. The Second Avenue subway will ultimately be a positive addition to the community. But we need to engage the community throughout the building process. To help businesses that are being affected by the construction of the Second Avenue subway, I will work with local, state and federal officials to provide an economic stability initiative to establish grants and property tax abatements.

New York is the greatest city in the world, but our politicians in Washington and Albany are failing to lead. As an example, Carolyn Maloney recently held a fundraiser at the home of a financial lobbyist—while serving on the committee negotiating financial reform. That’s wrong. I’ve pledged to never accept a penny of corporate PAC money in my career. And I will fight the special interests culture that brings Congress to a standstill. We can’t keep re-electing the same politicians and expecting change. Together we can change our broken system and build a new era of opportunity and prosperity for all New Yorkers.
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Reshma Saujani is a Democratic candidate for Congress in New York’s 14th Congressional District.

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The Hollywood precedent for one great director remaking another’s work starts with Fritz Lang refashioning both Jean Renoir’s La Chienne and La Bête Humaine into, respectively, Scarlet Street and Human Desire—turning art into entertainment. Now Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers’ debut film Blood Simple into A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, turning pop into art.

Zhang keeps the basic story of an illicit couple attempting to escape the woman’s brutish husband—a transgression that looms into greed and murder. But in changing the Coens’ contemporary tale into a period meditation, Zhang elevates the moral reckoning as if retelling a classic cautionary Chinese folk tale. This doesn’t contradict Zhang’s own lushly moralistic, openly political films. In fact, the adulterous plot closely resembles Zhang’s 1988 Ju Dou, which was already quite similar to The Postman Always Rings Twice. But like the Coens, Zhang has grown into greater filmmaking. He achieves a mix of tones that always felt unstable in Blood Simple but comes naturally to Zhang’s elaborate showmanship in Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower.

After breaking-down the Coens’ plot to its almost comical essence, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop reveals its dark existential joke. What looked like snark becomes unironic amusement, as in a kitchen scene where noodle-twirling expands into a larger, awesome, pizza-like spinning demonstration, nearly an Olympic-event spectacle. Each character’s paranoia, cowardice or viciousness exaggerates them like commedia dell’arte figures. Humor is prompted by modern acting—pouts, grimaces, sass—in a period setting. Zhang portrays neo-noir folly as operatic farce. His visual style goes to Expressionist extremes to illustrate a world of moral chaos: cobalt skies, vermillion earth and eerie striations in mountains.

From one great director to another, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop pays tribute to the Coens by improving their earlier immature work. Zhang reinterprets the Coens’ least humorous film as extravagant deadpan. He articulates a deep, cosmic understanding of fate and reveals the inherent complexity that the Coens would articulate only in later, more dazzling and mature films.

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A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
Directed by Zhang Yimou
Runtime: 95 min

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Takers has a Brother vibe that only partly has to do with most of its dapper bank robber cast being African American. Co-producing rap artists and stars, Tip “T.I.” Harris and Chris Brown, make vivid use of the crime movie genre’s social significance, which lackadaisical film commentators have mostly ignored. Takers accents the genre’s bonhomie: its exercise of the same working-class frustrations young black artists articulated in hip-hop music and music videos under the influence of ’70s blaxploitation movies. But Takers is not a cultish parody like Machete from Robert Rodriguez. It is—to redeem a police blotter phrase—a Saturday Night Special, excitingly executed.

A scene from Takers.

The story of a mixed (black and white) Los Angeles heist crew is in a grand entertainment tradition: They stage an audacious skyscraper escape then lay low, only to get seduced into a hasty new job by an estranged ex-con colleague (T.I.). The risks taken involve the hazards of trust, sentiment and bravado more than greed, but also reflect class and economic dissatisfaction, going back to the genre’s roots, its honor-testing origins. Takers’ ads mention Michael Mann’s 1995 Heat, but I prefer a richer comparison: The Wild Bunch, for Sam Peckinpah’s vision of the self-destructive way socially maladjusted men embrace outlawry.

John Luessenhop’s direction and Armen Minasian’s editing are closer to Peckinpah’s lucid, aestheticized morality than Mann’s gloss. The spectacle does not overwhelm the personalities, and each man—Idris Elba, Paul Walker, Hayden Christensen, Matt Dillon, Jay Rodriguez, Michael Ealy plus T.I. and Brown—carries at least a sketch of family bonds or masculine empathy. Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s participation proves the filmmakers’ serious ambitions, which proceed from critic Robert Warshow’s once-famous thesis “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), which explained: “The gangster is a man of the city… not the real city but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.” No longer an alienated figure, the gangster outlaw reflecting black urban experience has come to represent a desperate response to the fact of the city’s anonymity and death. That’s also been the essence of serious and braggadocious hip-hop and the tragic late-20th-century sensibility that Peckinpah beautifully realized.

All this is implicit in Takers’ flashy, dangerous lawbreaking. Its hip-hop bunch sustain camaraderie through shared awareness of the city’s implicit anonymity and death. Fans who can distinguish between mania and connoisseurship will appreciate this even in Paul Walker’s manly stride. Materialism means less to the Takers than obligation to family and friends—as in Elba and Dillon’s brother/father subplots that one montage fleetly interweaves. The bunch’s new heist revives antagonism between Ealy and T.I., personified in Zoe Saldana’s switched romantic loyalties. Their sexual and ethical tensions recall how Peckinpah portrayed William Holden and Robert Ryan’s.

Through Luessenhop and the screenwriting team’s connoisseurship and skills, Takers refines a genre that has been hollowed-out by the cold repetitions of such cliché movies as Soderbergh’s Oceans franchise and the cheap ambiguities of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, American Gangsters and Brooklyn’s Finest. Those films are lugubrious product compared to Takers. Even when doing action movie conventions (a dizzying hotel shoot-out with haunting voice-overs), Luessenhop at least does them swiftly.

His light, clear style creates a Testosteronarama: This cast of studly has-beens and romantic wannabes outclasses the pathetic Expendables and are almost as dazzling as RocknRolla. Dillon’s finest performance in years sets the tone of aggrieved morality, defining a man’s aggression as dedication (Ryan in The Wild Bunch was no more moving). And Chris Brown gets a showcase chase scene that is one of action cinema’s all-time greatest. He runs for his life, passing through escalating levels of urban achievement, vaulting through danger, challenging fate. It should define his career like Jim Brown’s 50-yard dash in The Dirty Dozen.

Luessenhop can’t top that climax, but his shift to mournful mode effectively confronts death—Peckinpah’s grave leveler. The pile-up seems overloaded, rather shortchanging the significance of Ghost, T.I.’s duplicitous character—perhaps a pretentious idea yet he’s a figure whose dazzling arrogance deserves better. Better is what Takers scrupulously provides action-movie devotees usually suckered into cheering greed and swagger unrelated to their personal experience. The Brother vibe is epitomized in the image of the crew strutting past an exploding news helicopter. Turning that cliché into an image of multi-racial male bonding makes Takers a true thriller, superior to big-budget action films like Salt and Heat that exploit the urban audience while ignoring it.

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Takers
Directed by John Luessenhop
Runtime: 107 min.

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By Jordan Mazza

You and your best friend are the perfect match. You share countless qualities: you both like to go to bed early, stay organized, listen to Lady Gaga—even eat cold pizza. But one of the few qualities you do not share is gender, and according to your school’s housing policy, this means you cannot share a room either.

A movement to allow college students to choose roommates of either gender is spreading.

This year, though, more than 30 colleges nationwide are launching unprecedented gender-neutral, or gender-blind, housing policies. Such a policy permits upperclassmen to select their own roommates, with no restrictions on gender. Participating schools include Cornell, Stanford, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Michigan and Dartmouth.

Columbia University is one school currently debating gender-neutral housing. Sean Udell is the president of the Columbia College Class of 2011 and leader of the Columbia Genderblind Housing Initiative.

“Our policy is first and foremost for transgender and gender-nonconforming students who don’t feel comfortable with the current housing options,” Udell said.

The Columbia proposal passed almost unanimously in the university’s student senate. But just days before housing selection began in February, Dean of Students Kevin Shollenberger announced the policy would not be considered, due to insufficient student support. In response, the Columbia Genderblind Housing Initiative collected more than 1,000 student signatures for a petition, and hopes to draft a new proposal by September.

“They just don’t want to bother explaining this to incoming freshmen and parents,” Udell said of his university’s decision to reject the policy.

Though gender-blind housing is generally not available to freshmen, who are assigned roommates, some parents of incoming students are wary of the option.

“As a dad, I’d feel a little awkward about it,” said Bill Clarke of Bedford, N.Y., whose daughter is a prospective New York University student. The university currently allows mixed-sex suitemates, and is considering offering gender-blind rooms.

Columbia and NYU may look to the almost 50 colleges nationwide that have implemented some form of genderblind housing, including many in the last year.

Ross Maxwell is the housing services coordinator at Occidental College in Los Angeles, which introduced three gender-neutral rooms in 2009.

“We’ve expanded it quite a bit this year and added a lot more rooms,” Maxwell said. “So far, we haven’t had a whole lot of complaints, but I think it helps that our institution is small and our student body is more liberal.”

Yet the idea of co-ed roommates irks some students and officials at other colleges.

“I would be afraid as a male that if I had conflicts, the female would always win, and say I tried to sexually harass them,” said Mark Cubbage, a junior at Bridgewater College in Bridgewater, Va. “

According to a recent study by Dr. Brian Willoughby, professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University, “co-ed dorms seem to be associated with higher levels of risk-taking” activities like binge drinking.

Dr. Gayatri Gopinath, director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at NYU, said she believes gender-blind housing embodies a logical evolution from earlier movements.

“Gender-blind housing should absolutely be an option,” Gopinath said. “Early feminism was about women’s empowerment, and this is a great progression to transgender empowerment. But we should remember that some people prefer the dynamic of single-sex housing.”

“I’m sure there’s some social value to the traditional policy,” Udell said. “But really it’s about choice. Everyone at this school is an adult, and should be able to make decisions for themselves.”
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Jordan Mazza studies journalism at New York University.

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By Josh Perilo

Recently, I talked a little about an obsession I’ve had: Comparing different wine varietals to different genres of popular music. Any critic loves making lists and metaphors, and, even better, lists of metaphors. I started by laying out my thoughts on why I think Merlot could be compared to Pop Rock. This week, I present my second thesis: Cabernet Sauvignon is Hard Rock, or in classic terms, good old-fashioned, straightforward rock ‘n’ roll.

Cabernet Sauvignon stands tall as the cornerstone of red wine grapes today. Its big, meaty tannins are fuzzed-out guitar licks, squealing from feedback. The oak barrels they age in are distortion pedals, bending the notes of flavor. The dark berry fruit blasts forth like an overcranked Marshall stack, blasting into an audience of thousands at Red Rocks.

These are rock star wines. And I’m not talking about the lead singer of Maroon 5 or Nickelback, either. This is the rock star that played Altamont and Woodstock. The first one. This is Jimi-frigging-Hendrix.

This is Cabernet Sauvignon.

The left bank Bordeaux producers make wines that are, by law, at least 51 percent Cabernet Sauvignon. Many of them are made up of almost all Cabernet Sauvignon. These are our old-school grandfathers of rock. Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry are the big, bad boys of the Haute Medoc. Elvis Pressley’s “That’s Alright, Mama” is the great Chateau Latour. These are the architects of the style that was to come and the style that created what a Cab was “supposed to taste like,” just as Chuck Berry created the idea of what a guitar lick in a rock song was supposed to sound like.

If you listen to the first jangly riffs to The Kingsmen’s version of “Louis, Louis,” you are hearing the first serious vintners in Napa Valley in the early 1970s tasting their brand-new Cabernet Sauvignon. It was modeled after the classics in Bordeaux, just as the Kingsmen’s noisy garage band classic was modeled after the blues riffs that came before them. There was a new take, though. Something that’s more forward and more accessible. Maybe simpler and messier, but something that the world would sit up and take notice of immediately.

As the Napa Cabs evolved and became more complex, carving out an identity of their own, they moved from the “garage rock” versions of their early incarnations and into more sophisticated takes on what became known as rock ‘n’ roll. The California “Cult Cabs,” as they became known, were the next step in the evolution of Classic Rock. The fruit got bigger, the structure more refined, and a masterpiece like Diamond Creek’s “Gravelly Meadow” becomes the Sticky Fingers of Napa Cabs. Ultimate wines that tend to define the grape varietal are common among these cult wines. Take the ultra expensive and untouchable Screaming Eagle. Quite simply, the liquid version of Houses of the Holy.

As Cabernet moved across the West Coast, it lightened its step and took itself a little less seriously. By the time it reached Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez Valley, the grapes were riper and higher in alcohol, and the fruit was juicier and simpler, if not more fun to enjoy. These Cabs rollick along your palate like a scratchy LP of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Just enough twang to remind you it isn’t Napa, but the classic roots-rock structure of the Cab is still there to hold everything together.

In the ’80s, the winemakers of Tuscany, Italy, began experimenting with Cabernet. It was against the law to call these wines anything other than “red table wine,” so they were unofficially labeled “Super Tuscans.” This unorthodox take on Cab was a redux on the classic format of the Cabs from the past. The first Super Tuscan was Tignanello. Those first squealing notes blared out again from an overpumped amp, just like they did when The Kingsmen reinvented rock music. Only this time it wasn’t Napa, and it wasn’t the Kingsmen either. It was The White Stripes’ “Dead Leaves on the Dirty Ground.” The volume knob was up to 11, and the wine world would never be the same.

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