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Chicago Tribune
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: How ‘Breaking Away' helped a newbie cyclist conquer his inner critic
The right sports movie can really do a number on you. It can maneuver around cliches, resistance points and aversions to string-pulling to win the big race against your more skeptical instincts. The right sports movie, even if it's not great, has wily ways of inspiring us to do something, try something, go somewhere we haven't yet. It can bend us, at least a little, into a new, in-progress variation of the person we were the last time we checked. But it's usually not immediate. Movies tend to roll around in your head, half-remembered, for decades. And then it's there again, when you need it. Last weekend, for example. Last weekend, the 1979 charmer 'Breaking Away,' nominally about cycling but about much more, glided out of the mists of time to push me up another series of hills on the second day of a three-day, two-night bike-packing trip out of Lower Manhattan, up through the Bronx, past Yonkers, into rural New York State and then into a lovely bit of Connecticut. And back again. Movie first, personal experience later. Forty-six summers ago, 'Breaking Away' came out in theaters. It started slowly, not a hit, but it built an audience week by week and became one. Such things were possible then. Director Peter Yates, best known as an action director ('Bullitt'), wasn't a likely choice for the material but he turned out to be good for it. The screenplay by playwright and screenwriter Steve Tesich won the Oscar; it dealt with four recent working-class high school graduates living in Bloomington, Indiana, in the shadow of Indiana University and in a state of uncertainty regarding their own futures. Tesich basically combined two of his unfilmed scripts set in Bloomington and came up with 'Bambino,' retitled 'Breaking Away.' Dennis Christopher, beautifully cast and, on a recent rewatch, even better than I remembered, played Dave Stohler, the cycling enthusiast besotted with all things Italian, from grand opera to scraps of handbook Italian phrases. ('Buongiorno!' he calls out to a perplexed neighbor as he rides by.) His doleful father, portrayed by Paul Dooley in a magically right match of performer and material, despairs for his blithely romantic son's future. Barbara Barrie, nominated for an Academy Award, plays Dave's fond, supportive mother. Dave and his friends spend their summer days hanging out at the limestone quarry, ragging on each other, cliff-jumping into the water, wondering what sort of lives await them. The big race in 'Breaking Away' happens when the Italian cyclists sponsored by Cinzano agree to come to Indianapolis to compete. This race gives Dave the setback his story requires, prior to the climactic 'Little 500' race back in Bloomington. Dave and his cohorts, the 'cutters,' aka the townies in a town built on working-class stone cutters' labor, square off on wheels against the privileged IU fraternity racers. Is the movie a classic? Friends, that is so very much up to you. Few things in life are touchier or more prone to argument than the topic of favorite sports movies. What I liked about 'Breaking Away,' back when I was a year out of college, and again on a rewatch the other day, had everything to do with a very simple matter, described aptly by one sub-Reddit poster as 'the simple joy of riding a bike.' The poster added: 'But if that doesn't sound interesting, it isn't worth a watch.' To which another Reddit poster countered: 'Well, I have zero interest in bike riding and I loved this movie.' 'Breaking Away' keeps its tensions between townies and university students relatively uncomplicated, but as Christopher told PBS NewsHour in 2019, 'There this lesson in it about class struggle, and you never see stories like that anymore. There's a story about how the father and mother grow closer together through this eccentric child. And there's a story about how all the male characters are examples of male doubt at this particular time in their lives.' Last weekend I joined a dear friend on her second bike-packing trip with the terrific Brooklyn, New York outfit 718 Outdoors, run by a former architect and bike shop proprietor Joe Nocella. My friend is a lifelong jock ('and so much more!' she states, for the record) and I am not. I learned a few things on the trip. I learned that 'training' for even a modest 130-mile excursion, which in my case meant not training enough, will probably work better if I train without the quotation marks. I learned that bike-packing, which means carrying a lot of stuff in pannier bags on your bike, takes some effort. Some of that is mental. I learned that various forms of adversity on the first, 58-mile day provoked an interior debate conducted by my inner pessimist (), my inner realist () and my inner stoic optimist (). I overpacked by 30-40%. On day one, I scraped the side of a stone pathway marker hard enough yet slowly enough to detach, in a permanent way, one of the pannier's buckles. Also, I treated the bottom hook attachment as an unnecessary backup, which was the wishful thinking of a newbie. But I learned this, too, so very gratefully: Our tour group of 20 or so, of all ages, from all over the globe by ancestry and all over New York City by residency, plus me, from Chicago, met every challenge in their individual ways. A typical number of flat tires; some wonky rack problems; hills too much for some of us, leading to pushing the bikes up the rest of the way on foot. These things happen, and they happened. On day three I had some of the finest medically untrained minds in the country performing emergency surgery on my broken spoke. They got me going again, and back to New York City. And, separately, the riders who teamed up to MacGyver my busted pannier with a complex and delicate array of straps, bungee cords and inner tubes came up with a group art installation worthy of serious critical praise. 'A thing of ugly beauty' One of my former (and best) Tribune editors, Kevin Williams, now lives in Porto, Portugal, where he allegedly takes it easier than he used to in Chicago in terms of his maniacal yet stylish devotion to high-intensity cycling. I asked him if cycling held any life lessons for him, and how riding on two wheels might have informed other parts of his life. His reply, in part: 'The weight room, the place I used to make my cycling better, had different lessons, or more like a notion. Which essentially was, 'After you do this, nothing else you do today will be as hard.'' The bike-packing last weekend was hard, and great, and the communal cookout around the fire on night two went on for several wonderful hours, just before the frogs near the campsite in Connecticut started croaking. Stray images from 'Breaking Away' rode with me the whole time. As the miles piled up, I resembled a young Daniel Stern, a little too big and a lotta too gangly for his own bike. But at the end of it all, I felt like Dennis Christopher, hoisting his team's trophy at the end of the movie.
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
Meet the Young Aristocrat That's Making Brunello Cool Again
This story is from an installment of The Oeno Files, our weekly insider newsletter to the world of fine wine. Sign up here. Thirty-year-old vintner Santiago Cinzano has just launched a new estate called Conti Marone Cinzano, where he is pioneering an unorthodox viticultural philosophy: selecting the best plot in any given vintage to create his wine, Lot.1 Brunello di Montalcino. Due to increasing climatic unpredictability, the plot changes every year and is selected during the ripening season based on the year's conditions and their influence on the vines. After realizing that members of his age group prefer other styles of wine to age-worthy Brunello with potentially hefty tannins, Cinzano launched his project with an eye toward making Brunello cool again. More from Robb Report $2.2 Million Worth of Ancient Artifacts Trafficked Through New York Are Returning to Greece and Italy Spring-Break Travel Prices Have Hit a Record High This Year How to Sell a Bottle of Wine From Your Collection The 10th generation of a winemaking dynasty whose surname is more closely associated with Vermouth and Asti Spumante than red wine, Cinzano notes that his friends prefer to drink styles such as Beaujolais, Trousseau from Jura, and crisp, fresh reds from the slopes of Mount Etna rather than what they consider an overly tannic red that may not be ready to drink for another 10 years. 'Don't get me wrong—I know that today Brunello's reputation is at an all-time high,' Cinzano says. 'But people my age want to drink cool wines. Montalcino, Brunello, today, they are not cool. They're prestigious. They're high end. They're historical. They're classic. But Brunello is not considered cool by 25- to 30-year-olds.' Ten years ago, Cinzano's father, Count Francesco Marone Cinzano, ceded 10 percent of the land owned by his Montalcino wine estate Col d'Orcia to Santiago and his brother to begin a project of their own. At that time, this portion of the estate had been planted with fields of grain, olive groves, and forests, which Santiago replaced with Sangiovese planted in bush-vine style. The elder Cinzano had sold the remaining 50 percent of his family's eponymous Vermouth and sparkling-wine brand when his own father died in a car accident in 1989, and his son's first line item in starting a new project was to use his family name on the bottle, which was easier said than done. The sale of Cinzano was a painful end to an illustrious family legacy dating back to 1757, and while Santiago wanted to reclaim the name, multiple legal consultants and attorneys told him it would be impossible. Unbeknown to Francesco, Santiago set up a meeting in Milan with Luca Garavoglia, chairman of Campari Group, the current owner of Cinzano. 'I presented this project, and he told me, 'As long as Campari owns Cinzano, I will never make your life difficult. Send me a bottle for Christmas. Please, use your family name, feel free,'' he says. And thus Conti Marone Cinzano was born, for which Santiago often uses the shorthand CMC. With his family name back in play, it was important to him to take a personal, intimate approach to every aspect of winemaking from vineyard to bottle, including his and Francesco's signature on the label and hand-numbering each bottle. Because his 10-year-old vineyard is not producing grapes of the quality necessary for such a special project, CMC Lot.1 is currently reliant on the vines of Col d'Orcia, where 272 acres are planted at 500 to almost 1,500 feet above sea level with many different expositions and multiple soil types. The vineyard has been broken down into micro-parcels so that the team can understand each and every plot as deeply as possible. Working closely with enologist Dr. Donato Lanati of Giacomo Conterno and Giuseppe Mascarello fame, Cinzano's Lot.1 is a single-vineyard wine, but it will not be from the same plot each vintage. 'In the past eight years we've seen the warmest year on record, the driest year on record, and the rainiest autumn on record,' Santiago says. 'We are seeing such a level of climatic variability and unpredictability that the concept of having to rely on a single plot is becoming less and less reliable.' With that in mind, Lanati analyzes grapes samples just after veraison, which indicates the onset of ripening. He is looking for aromatic precursors that at that point cannot be smelled or tasted in the grape; they are released only during fermentation. Lanati examines the grapes prior to full ripening and can predict the evolution of aromas, thereby choosing the best plots weeks before harvest and then narrowing it down to just one. 'When we are harvesting that parcel, we go even further, and it's a selection of the best bunches from that already selected parcel,' he says. 'The parameters allow me to do very short maceration and very delicate pump overs to have a fresh, approachable wine, but at the same time I can extract a lot of aromas.' Seeking to release a wine that's age-worthy yet still approachable, Santiago and Lanati's goal is a 'Brunello that even in its first year of release has tannins that are extremely integrated, extremely silky, and extremely round,' Lanati says. Cinzano's 2019 Lot.1 is derived from what he calls a 'textbook vintage.' Sourced from the estate's almost 40-year-old Canneto vineyard, the wine benefited from 'near perfect equilibrium' in its soil composition. 'The limestone, clay, and sandy components have great balance, which in a vintage like 2019, where you didn't need the most draining soil or the most retentive soil, you go for a very balanced soil,' he says. The plot's southern exposure and ample sunlight brought on perfect phenolic ripeness, which is necessary to make great wine. The entire lot was aged in a single large wooden tank called a botte and was transferred to bottle in August 2023. Conti Marone Cinzano 2019 Lot.1 Brunello di Montalcino is deep garnet in the glass and has a bouquet of cranberry, pomegranate, cherry, and vanilla with touches of saddle leather and tobacco leaf. Flavors of ripe summer cherry and dried cranberry are wrapped in brilliant acidity and polished tannins shot through with a bold vein of minerality. Shimmering acidity lingers into the drawn-out finish. If this wine doesn't make Brunello cool again, we wonder if anything will. Do you want access to rare and outstanding reds from Napa Valley? Join the Robb Report 672 Wine Club today. Best of Robb Report Why a Heritage Turkey Is the Best Thanksgiving Bird—and How to Get One 9 Stellar West Coast Pinot Noirs to Drink Right Now The 10 Best Wines to Pair With Steak, From Cabernet to Malbec Click here to read the full article.
