Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2020 i Robb Report

Ted Loos Loos has written about wine and art for the last 25 years, for The New York Times, WSJ magazine and others. Formerly a wine contributor for Travel + Leisure and an Epicurious columnist, Loos put his vintage knowledge to good use this issue, surveying five up-and-coming wine regions in “The New New Worlds” (p. 120). “The wine world has expanded so much since I began covering it,” he says. “Just talking to folks in these emerging locales makes me want to pack my bags and explore.” Jemima Sissons While writing her story for this issue, “The Great Escapes” (p. 42), on restorative retreat destinations, Sissons was on a remote getaway of her own. “I wrote the story from the wilds of northern Georgia in the Caucasus,” she says.…

Moderation, that noble pursuit, is never harder than during the end-of-year party season. And while all good things come to an end, no one says you can’t roll right into recovery: Once the last toasts have been made and the last drams drunk, it’s time for some proper R&R, whether that means rest & relaxation or reboot & revitalization. No matter if your metabolism favors disappearing into the wilderness or escaping into a sweat-soaked workout refresher, we have just what the doctor ordered. OFF THE GRID Islas Secas Reserve & Lodge Nestled in the Gulf of Chiriquí, Panama, Islas Secas is the ultimate in hidden luxury for those who desire complete privacy and off-the-beaten-track adventure. One of the hottest destinations for 2020, Islas Secas puts sustainability at its heart: The…

SHOOTING BLANCS Cognac Ferrand 10 Generations A collector’s-edition Cognac made with Ugni Blanc grapes, with light touches of orange, raisins and ginger. ($60) RUM RUNNER Don Papa 10-Year Molasses, vanilla and tannins enough to be considered a (boozy) sweets break. ($70) HAIR OF THE DOG Lone Whisker 12-Year Accessibly-proofed bourbon with balanced notes of citrus, honey and pepper, from a pair of Napa Valley vintners. ($150) PSSST . . . JOHNNIE’S THE RAT Johnnie Walker Blue Label Year of the Rat The same Blue Label you love, specially packaged for the brand’s latest Zodiac Collection release. ($250) THE NEW AFTER-MEAL NIP Brancamenta A bracing hit of peppermint nicely smoothed with rich caramel sweetness. ($30) PLATINUM SETTING Qui Platinum Extra Añejo Mellow, grassy and mildly spicy, this extra-aged agave spirit is…

Virtuoso Charlie Siem, 33, has become almost as well known for his personal style as for his talent with a violin. He’s made international best-dressed lists, has performed with the world’s top orchestras and the Who, has played for Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and, at 26, became one of the youngest professors in the UK at Leeds College of Music. Almost constantly on the road, the native Brit—and his rare 1735 Guarneri del Gesù violin—will appear onstage in Beirut for the first time this year to perform at the Al Bustan Festival. One of his career highlights was playing at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, which, he says, “felt like I’d arrived and I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.” What have you done recently for the first…

NOT EVERY DAY—or body of water—delivers waves worthy enough to ride. Hence the paddleboard, more serene than it is thrilling. But adrenaline junkies now have another option. No surf is no problem with Fliteboard, an electric hydrofoil surfboard that will make even newbies feel like Laird Hamilton. Developed by kiteboarder David Trewern, in Australia’s Byron Bay, the $12,935 plank lifts a rider well above the water and can cruise as fast as 28 mph. Mediocre at best in my surfing heyday, I hoped muscle memory would at least allow me to stand during a recent demo off Malibu’s Carbon Beach. The Fliteboard, however, was surprisingly stable and easy to maneuver. In no time, I was levitating over small swells, gaining speed and confidence while gliding beyond the pier to carve…

While elite carmakers won’t be creating their future designs simpler and cheaper anytime soon, there is a growing demand for a new breed of relatively youthful collector cars that offer contemporary performance and a purer mechanical driving experience, largely unfiltered by electronics. They’re known as “modern classics,” and you might want to park one in your garage now before prices spiral upward. Each year, collector-car insurer Hagerty publishes its Bull Market List of models that have risen strongly in value over the last 12 months and are likely to keep doing so. All but 3 of the 19 autos featured in the past two years are from the 1980s or later, and more than half are from the 2000s. This is partly explained by people, like me, in their 40s…

According to a popular quip, age is down to mind over matter: “If you don’t mind, then it doesn’t matter.” But enough people do mind that the anti-aging industry is worth some $100 billion—and counting—every year. Sadly for those people, and the rest of us, attempts to halt the clock seem as futile now as when our ancestors searched for the Fountain of Youth. The modern but ghastly practice of so-called vampire infusions of young blood—costing $8,000 a liter—became the latest age-defeating bunk consigned to the trash, following a warning last year from the Food and Drug Administration that they don’t work. No great surprise there—nor that people were willing to try it. As I move through my 40s, conventional anti-aging advice from scientists and doctors has remained much the…

Which is to say the notion of an automobile going back a hundred years—a multi-box design on four tires, with a wheel and pedals, aimed by people and powered by orderly little explosions—has been upended by a maelstrom of globalization, technological revolution, environmental reckoning and a wholesale assault on the ownership model. Such extreme disruption has unleashed a rapid evolution of the automotive species, with strange creatures now roaming the roads: Rolls-Royce SUVs and silent, battery-powered Croatian hyper-cars; Cybertrucks and fin-shaped hatchbacks with gullwings and brains big enough to take the wheel for a spell. It’s like looking around one day and realizing some dogs are now the size of horses and chirp, while others have opposable thumbs, sonar and definite opinions on Brexit. Take the luxury car. Not long…

Renowned architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas has spent much of his career hopping from “one site of urban density to another,” says Troy Conrad Therrien, the Guggenheim Museum’s architecture curator. He would occasionally escape to the Swiss Alps “to find moments of repose,” Therrien says, but “for Rem, going to the countryside was like going to Mars.” When modernity encroached on his beloved retreat, Koolhaas turned his attention from metropolitan cacophony to the rest of the (mostly undeveloped) world. The result is Countryside, the Future, an exhibition opening February 20 at the Guggenheim in New York. Beginning with a towering wall of Koolhaas’s questions about what lies ahead, the show sums up an investigation he undertook with AMO, the think tank associated with his Office for Metropolitan Architecture, aided by…

Tesla owners believe electrification is the future and the transportation industry shouldn’t drain natural resources. Porsche Taycan buyers? That’s not what drives them. They want repeatable, blistering and uncompromising performance—it just so happens that the Taycan is electric. We tested two Taycan models, the Turbo and the Turbo S, to see if the marque’s battery-powered salvos hit their intended targets. Slip into the Taycan Turbo and you feel like you’re seated in a 911. This is on purpose, of course, but what’s nothing like the 911 is the tech. The curved driver’s display adds a subtle futuristic touch to the cabin, as do the two centralized touchscreens. In a surprising simplification, we cycle through the drivetrain options—Range, Normal, Sport, Sport Plus and Individual, found with the Sport Chrono Package—by rotating…

Pressing on the throttle, I feel the vehicle’s immediate response as it surges down an empty street. A light tap of the hydraulic disc brakes before the turn allows the tires to carve with scalpel-like precision—ride dynamics worthy of the famed cobra logo. The Shelby livery is synonymous with performance, but what’s currently being harnessed is just about 3 hp as I hold tightly to the handlebars of this new electric bicycle. Built in collaboration with Carroll Shelby International, the limited-edition two-wheeler from Vintage Electric is painted the same shade as many Shelby iterations, including the Cobra 289 Slabside, and its leather saddle and handgrips take inspiration from those automotive interiors. The cruiser, with a street-legal top speed of 20 mph, runs on a 48-volt battery and a 750-watt hub…

In a new future-meets-the-past venture, Swedish company OceanSky Cruises is bringing airship journeys into the 21st century with a 36-hour route from the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard to the North Pole. The Airlander 10 is the largest flying vehicle on the planet both in length (about 300 feet) and volume (1.3 million cubic feet). And it’s five times the size of the Goodyear blimp. It’s been nearly a century since something of its kind has flown commercially, and founder and CEO Carl-Oscar Lawaczeck says the diesel- and electric-powered airship is being outfitted like an ocean liner in the sky, with eight en suite staterooms, a lounge and bar and fine dining on board. Viewing areas will be equipped with panoramic windows and transparent floors, ideal for gazing at the Northern…

Collectors are like elephants. They remember how they built their collections, and they definitely remember the first time they won at auction. So it’s significant that generations of budding collectors are enjoying the adrenaline rush of their initial auction win while sitting before a screen or holding a smartphone instead of sitting in an auction house and raising a paddle. The auction world has long experience with bidders who aren’t actually in the sale room, thanks to absentee and phone bidding. That’s about the only head start auction houses had on the digital revolution. Online bidding had a democratizing and global effect by letting people follow and virtually join sales they could never have hoped to attend in person. The trick, of course, is in convincing those bidders to come…

Say you’ve arrived home after a leisurely weekend upstate. You plug in your Tesla—every spot in your condominium’s garage has an outlet compatible with any electric vehicle—or perhaps you drop your Envoy electric car share with the resident-dedicated fleet. You slip past the conservatory’s 20-foot-tall trees and the seven-story meadow wall that serve as part of the building’s air-filtration system. As you consider a dip in the saltwater swimming pool, you arrive at your apartment and the full glory of the sunset across Manhattan, thanks to walls of high-insulating glass, whose clarity, due to low levels of iron in the silica, also eliminates the need for artificial light by day. Your building’s zero-waste pledge means trash receptacles are outnumbered by compost containers and recycling bins for everything from old clothes…

The world of wine has always operated on its own schedule—greatness takes time. It generally requires many seasons for a vineyard to mature to the point at which the vines produce wine with serious aging potential. In the big picture, some European regions have spent a millennium or more refining the taste profiles of their bottlings. But the combination of rapidly evolving technology, emerging international economies and the progressing effects of climate change has scrambled the traditional map and fast-forwarded the timeline. There’s now good wine from Virginia, Israel and Brazil, but some countries we know and love—such as South Africa and Australia—have regions that may not be able to continue making the excellent wine we’re used to because of heat, drought and fires. Amid the chaos, happy surprises are…

From a distance they looked like ice cubes floating in the vast blue sea. As you drew closer, however, whether by helicopter or speedboat, the remarkable scene came into sharp focus: a fleet of some of the most beautiful yachts in the world, moored discreetly off the coast of a secret island that, for five days last October, played host to an extraordinary new event on the global marine calendar. There was the stunning Maltese Falcon, one of the world’s largest sailing yachts at 289 feet, its three towering masts making it an unmistakable presence on the water. Cloudbreak, an awesome 238-foot explorer, shimmered in the heat. The magnificent Dubai, all 531 feet of it, held the skyline while, on the other end of the scale, the petite, space-age trimaran…

There was a time when a mainstream Hollywood studio would bankroll a gritty, original film about an inventive character who challenges the audience’s beliefs. Now, amid changing viewing habits and a saturated entertainment market, the only way a studio will green-light that movie is if it’s the origin story for a Batman villain. The restaurant industry finds itself on the cusp of its own blockbuster era. While the last decade saw the rise of small, personal, independent restaurants, increased labor costs, soaring big-city rents, more expensive buildouts and changing dining habits mean new restaurants have a better chance to survive as part of a larger, more established brand. “I think it’s really hard to have one restaurant—you need to have three restaurants,” says Kevin Boehm, cofounder of Boka Restaurant Group,…

MB&F Legacy Machine Thunderdome For this masterpiece, Max Büsser of MB&F tapped two of the world’s most renowned watchmakers—Coudray and Kari Voutilainen, a collector’s darling known for creating exceptional timepieces under his own name—with the directive to create “the craziest, most cinematic three-axis tourbillon ever.” Working together for the first time, the pair created the spherical complication with three axes revolving at different speeds, on different planes, in a record-breaking 8, 12 and 20 seconds. The proprietary TriAx mechanism, the world’s fastest triple-axis regulating system, rises like a tornado above a light-blue guilloche dial plate in a whirlwind of caged gears and pinions. The new timepiece is a masterful follow-up to MB&F’s incredible Legacy Machine FlyingT for women, which won Women’s Timepiece of the Year in Robb Report’s Best of…

The Tarform expresses freedom in many novel ways, primarily through the absence of a conventional engine. TARAS KRAVTCHOUK WAS wrenching on a 60-year-old Triumph Bonneville in his Brooklyn garage when he began to envision a modern electric motorcycle—clean and sustainable—with philosophical roots to iconic machines of the past. Those simple machines embodied a spirit of independence, a concept that remains relevant but now seems rarer than ever. “We are creating products and services that do most things for us,” says the designer. “Food is delivered, and self-driving cars take us to our door with the tap of an icon. In the process, I believe the human spirit becomes dormant. Motorcycle riding provides one of the most powerful human experiences. We want people to reclaim their sense of freedom.” The Tarform…

The newly named Illusion is fast and efficient, able to hit 28 knots while burning 20 percent less fuel than craft of a comparable size, thanks to an innovative hull design. It also has an incredible 4,200-nautical-mile range, making it ideally suited for more environmentally conscious island-hopping with an intimate crowd of friends and family. When built by Dutch shipyard Heesen in 2013, the yacht, then named Galactica Star, became the world’s first to incorporate this new hull form by Van Oossanen Naval Architects: the Fast Displacement Hull Form. Chartered by Beyoncé and Jay-Z in 2015, the 213-foot vessel is now under new ownership, sports a 2019 refit and is available for charter through Burgess. The original interior, with a relatively small volume for a yacht of its size, is…

PEOPLE FROM AN organization called MIB may help save the world as we know it, but these are no Men in Black—they’re from the profoundly un-Hollywood Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, part of the University of Manchester in the UK. They say that a cleaner replacement for jet fuel, made from seawater, could be just a handful of years away. The biofuel, made by aquatic bacteria, is not only clean-burning but also cost-effective to produce and does not impact food production, according to Nigel Scrutton, director of MIB. And the work is urgently needed. A cleaner replacement for jet fuel, made from seawater, could be just a handful of years away. Aviation’s growing traffic levels are eclipsing efficiency gains—the proportion of greenhouse gases that comes from aviation currently accounts for 2…

ASK MAXIMILIAN RIEDEL who started the trend of ditching flutes in favor of wider-bowled glasses for sipping Champagne and he’ll tell you, “I did.” With his first Champagne wineglass, launched in 2014, he questioned tradition. Now the industry standard has moved to more generous bowls for bubbles. The wider glass exposes more surface area to oxygen, allowing the floral aromas and fruit flavors in the wine to express themselves. In a flute the yeast character is more dominant. Maximilian, the 11th generation in Austria’s iconic glassmaking family and CEO of Riedel Crystal since 2013, will also tell you that his first passion is wine, not glassware. “The glass is only an instrument for making the wine taste as good as possible,” he says. It was his grandfather Claus Riedel who…

In January of 2019 the Dutch government decided to manage rather than promote tourism in Amsterdam. Last year also saw the port of Venice announce plans to reroute cruise ships away from its fragile and historic city center. And in the run-up to Tokyo’s 2020 Olympics, the Japanese press have coined the term kankō kōgai, which means “tourism pollution.” As a traveler to 100 countries and counting, when I first heard about these shifts I felt relieved that the industry was finally addressing some issues. But another part of me feared for my future as an explorer: Would new limits prevent me from experiencing incredible places? Overtourism may seem like a trending phenomenon, but ask anyone in Florence, Majorca or Kyoto, and they’ll remind you that it’s a decades-old problem…

Back in the early 1980s, before personal computers and the internet and Wi-Fi and iPhones, before Facebook and Google and Uber and Netflix, when tax returns and college theses and invitations and bills were all on paper, Tishan Hsu worked nights word processing in law firms so he could make art by day. A graduate of MIT and a keen observer of the human condition, he noticed not only the speed with which a word processor churned out documents but how operating the nascent technology made a person sit, how it made a person feel. Gradually, a funny thing happened: The two worlds collided. His paintings and sculptures began to reflect his assessment that technology was becoming an extension of the human body, a condition he concluded was destined to…

A sense of gloom hangs in the air. “Bloodbath,” “free fall” and “slump” were just some of the choice idioms deployed by headline writers to describe the New York real estate market during the twilight of 2019. Across the pond, townhouses in central London—long the favored investment vehicle for billionaires from Bahrain to Belarus—have lost 20 percent of their value in a five-year nosedive. Worldwide, according to Savills, a global property consultancy, “everything is trending to zero.” “This is not a normal cycle,” says Frederick Peters, CEO of Warburg Realty. Even after the global financial crisis, luxury property prices in the world’s capitals recovered fully within two years and went on to smash all records. This time round, brokers and analysts agree, it’s different. So what lies ahead for 2020?…