Before There Was a Word for It
Some things arrive before the language does.
A car that redefined speed before anyone coined the category. A restaurant that invented a movement without knowing it was one. A wine made with patience at a moment when patience was unfashionable. An object so elemental it became a ritual, then a lifestyle, then a meme — and still makes a better cup of coffee than anything that came after. This issue is about those things. The originals. The ones that were doing it before it had a name.
Lamborghini Miura P400 S, 1968 — Verde Scandal
The engineers who designed the Miura, Gian Paolo Dallara, Paolo Stanzani, Bob Wallace, did it without permission and presented a bare rolling chassis at Turin in 1965 to see what would happen. What happened was that Ferruccio Lamborghini looked at the crowd gathered around it and decided to build it.
Marcello Gandini designed the body. He was 26.
The result was the first mid-engine road supercar. The template every supercar has followed since, engine behind the driver, weight centered, body as low as physics allowed, was established here, in Sant’Agata Bolognese, before there was a name for what they had made.
The S specification, introduced in 1968, is the one. Not the original P400, which had cooling and fuel delivery problems the factory quietly acknowledged. Not the SV, which gained power but also gained weight and lost something in the proportions. The S corrected what needed correcting and left everything else alone. The chrome window surrounds. The headlight eyelashes. The transverse V12 producing 370 horsepower, visible through the rear glass.
On Verde Scandal
The most important color in the Miura’s history arrived unexpectedly. At some point in the late 1960s, a woman came into a Lamborghini showroom wanting her car painted a shade of green that didn’t yet exist in the palette. When asked for a sample to match, she removed her dress and handed it to the salesman. The color was named Verde Scandal. The woman was never publicly identified.
The most documented Verde Scandal Miura belonged to Twiggy. She was 19, had been the most photographed person in the world for three years, and ordered through Lamborghini’s British distributor on Alie Street in Tower Hamlets. Chassis 3961, dispatched July 19, 1969: Verde Scandal exterior, dual Arancio and Bianco stripes, black interior, right-hand drive. The specification makes no attempt at restraint, which is either the problem or precisely the point, depending on your view of 1969.
What to look for
Original color with factory build record. The split-sump engine, fitted to later S examples, is worth verifying — it matters both mechanically and at resale. Factory air conditioning was fitted to a very small number of S models and is genuinely rare. The S over the SV: the SV is the faster car. The S is the more beautiful one.
The Restaurant
Chez Panisse — Berkeley, California, est. 1971
Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley in the summer of 1971. She was twenty-seven years old and had no professional culinary training. What she had was a fixed menu, a dining room that seated forty-nine, and a conviction that food should taste like what it actually was.
She started calling farmers directly. She paid more than the going rate and asked them to grow things specifically for her. She organized the menu around what was available, not the other way around. She refused frozen protein. She built relationships with fishermen, cheesemakers, ranchers, people who were quietly doing extraordinary work with no audience for it.
There was no phrase for any of this yet. “Farm-to-table” would not enter common usage for another twenty years. “Local” was not a marketing category. The idea that a restaurant might organize itself around the rhythms of a particular season and a particular place, rather than around a stable set of dishes, was unusual to the point of seeming eccentric.
What she was building, without knowing she was building it, was the template for the next half century of American fine dining.
The Cafe upstairs is excellent. The downstairs is the reason for the trip.
The Wine
Corison Kronos Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon — Napa Valley
Napa in the 1990s had a direction. It was going bigger. More extraction, more oak, higher alcohol. The critics wanted density and the winemakers followed. Fourteen, fifteen percent became standard. The wines scored well and aged poorly.
Cathy Corison went the other way.
She had been making wine in Napa since the late 1970s, and she understood what the valley’s best old vineyards were actually capable of producing: something elegant, restrained, structured for the long term. When she acquired Kronos, a small St. Helena vineyard planted to old head-trained Cabernet vines in 1971, she had a site that matched her approach exactly.
Kronos Cabernet is not trying to impress anyone in the near term. It arrives with structure that requires time, releases flavors slowly, and rewards the kind of patience that most wine culture does not particularly encourage. It is the opposite of a wine designed to drink well at a tasting.
Old vine as a meaningful category in Napa was not yet a thing she could lean on. Restraint was not fashionable. She made the wine anyway, and she made it the same way every year.
The current releases are worth finding. The older ones, if you encounter them, are worth nearly any price.
The allocation is small and sold largely direct. Join the mailing list at corison.com.
The Object
Bialetti Moka Express, 1933
Alfonso Bialetti made aluminum products in a workshop in Crusinallo, northern Italy. In 1933, watching his wife’s laundry boiler, a sealed drum that used pressure to circulate water through a pipe, he recognized a principle that could be applied to coffee. The octagonal aluminum form, the rubber gasket, the filter basket, the upper chamber that fills as pressure forces the water through: this is the Moka Express, unchanged in ninety years.
It does not make espresso. The pressure is not high enough. What it produces is something between espresso and brewed coffee, and what it demands is something most kitchen appliances don’t: your attention. You fill the base with cold water. You pack the filter with ground coffee. You set it over a low flame. Then you wait and listen, because the sound changes when it’s ready, and if you miss it the coffee burns. Four minutes, maybe five. You cannot walk away.
This is not a design flaw. It is the design.
The reason people still use it, in an era of machines that produce technically superior coffee at the touch of a button, is the same reason people drive cars without traction control on mountain roads. The engagement is the point. The Moka pot makes you feel, for a few minutes each morning, like you are standing in an Italian kitchen with nowhere to be. That quality of slowness, that deliberateness that we seek out on holiday in Europe and abandon the moment we return home, is what Bialetti built into an aluminum pot in 1933.
Before pour-over had a vocabulary, before home brewing was a lifestyle, before anyone used the word ritual to describe making a morning drink, there was this.
Alfonso Bialetti was reportedly buried in a Moka pot-shaped urn. Seems appropriate.
338 Miuras. Fifty-three years of fixed menus. Three hundred million coffee pots. One color named after a dress. See you next issue.