Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i Robb Report

Basem Wasef Wasef is a journalist specializing in high-end cars, motorcycles, watches and aircraft. After being tasked with covering airship trends (p. 82), the Egypt-born aviation enthusiast revealed he was surprised to learn how quickly the lighter-than-air transport market had pivoted during the pandemic. “The buzz was previously focused on luxury travel,” he explains, “but supply-chain issues and environmental concerns quickly shifted the conversation from leisure to utility.” Janelle Jones Jones is an editorial and commercial photographer based in Brooklyn. Drawing on her fine-art background, she has put her own playful spin on still-life images for publications including The New Yorker, Esquire, Bon Appétit and Robb Report. “I approach my work with a sense of humor and a love of color,” she says. Her keen eye for composition and detail…

All roads leading to Rome, it was perhaps inevitable that the Ryder Cup, golf's most prestigious event, would eventually swing by the Eternal City. But when the biennial event's 44th edition, the first in Italy, gets going at Rome's newly redeveloped Marco Simone Golf & Country Club this September, the US and European teams won't just be competing for continental supremacy. Organizers say they'll also be playing for the future of Italian golf. “Golf doesn't have huge awareness in Italy,” says Guy Kinnings, the DP World Tour's Ryder Cup director. “It's the 16th most popular pastime. What's the legacy we want to leave? We want to improve that.” It won't be easy. According to a survey of the world's golf courses by the R&A, one of the sport's governing bodies,…

VINTAGE CARTIER has always been a hot commodity, and the Parisian jeweler has always sold a selection of such pieces in its flagship boutiques, including Fifth Avenue in New York, London's Bond Street location and Rue de la Paix in Paris. But with the secondary market through the roof in nearly every luxury sector, the house has decided to up the offering. “We have a huge demand with a lot of requests from clients,” says Pierre Rainero, Cartier's longtime director of image, heritage and style. Cartier's commercial vintage program, known as Cartier Tradition, officially began in 1996 and was conceived by Rainero, who has been with the company in various roles since the ‘80s. It has grown from a handful of pieces distributed across its marquee storefronts to an inventory…

GENIUS AT WORK AS MODERN DIGITAL cameras put ever more megapixels and endless features into the hands of the everyday shooter, what does Leica—one of the most revered names in photography— come out with for its latest release? A film camera. You read that right. And not even a new film camera, but a reissue of a shooter from 1984, the M6. There's no screen to review your photos, no button to upload your selfie over Wi-Fi, and— perhaps you should sit down for this—it's manual focus. Has the company gone verrückt? Not at all, insists Stefan Daniel, executive vice president of technology and operations at Leica. “The prices for the M6 on the secondhand market have been rising constantly,” he says, “and the majority of people who want it…

WATER The newest trend for express cruisers in North American waters is based on a centuries-old Italian fishing boat. The traditional gozzo rounded stern and bow are immediately recognizable, and while the original style featured masts and sails, today's interpretations are more likely to have planing hulls and high-performance engines. But true aficionados are just as enamored with the Rubenesque design and romantic history of the vessel as they are with its modern handling characteristics, viewing the gozzo as the ideal platform for a prized one-off rather than a cookie-cutter acquisition. “We spend a lot of time customizing the boatslike a tailor-made suit,” says Giovanni Aprea, sales director of Apreamare, whose family has been in the business since 1849. Apreamare, based along Italy's Gulf of Naples, has the richest heritage…

ONE OF THE GREAT perks of private aviation is right there in the name: privacy. But the ability to stay hidden from prying eyes applies only inside the cabin. Social-media accounts that broadcast flight patterns of noteworthy names—including Drake, Taylor Swift, Nancy Pelosi, Kim Kardashian and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, as well as numerous sanctioned Russian oligarchs— have racked up millions of followers, with the Twitter handle @ElonJet gaining international attention before Musk himself suspended the account. The spotlight it shines is equal parts geeky hobby, gawker-level curiosity and emissions shaming—and Arnault, at least, eventually got sick of the glare, selling his Bombardier Global 7500 last fall and switching to charter flights with private passenger manifests. And it's not just business magnates, celebrities and politicians who are vulnerable. Anyone traveling…

2003 | Mercedes-Benz SL55AMG SPECS: 493 hp | 155 mph top speed | 14 mpg PRICE WHEN NEW: $113,915 VALUE TODAY: ▼ $26,200 to $38,600¹ WHAT WE SAID THEN: “The excitement and the feel of that exhaust system tuned with that motor-it was a cross between Mozart and Frank Zappa.” WHAT WE SAY NOW: Today, our 2003 champion is just an old used car, while the Ferrari 575M, which lost out to the Merc, is an appreciating classic. 2004 | Bentley Continental GT SPECS: 552 hp | 198 mph top speed | 12 mpg PRICE WHEN NEW: $149,000 VALUE TODAY: ▼ $26,500 to $38,000¹ WHAT WE SAID THEN: “In accordance with W.O. Bentley's decree, this GT is most certainly an adventure in exhilarating power, elegance, grace and distinction.” WHAT WE…

FOOD & DRINK Beware the buzz around “library vintages” and “re-release programs,” terms now tossed around with such abandon that they're being used describe bottles that are a mere 10 or 15 years old. For the real deal, look to Rioja, whose wineries hold some of the oldest vinous treasures known to man—and where, this past September, Herederos del Marqués de Riscal hosted marathon library tasting of 30 vintages from 1862 through 1964, including preand post-phylloxera examples. Marqués de Riscal, with its Frank Gehry–designed hotel and sprawling “city of wine” complex, is among a handful of Rioja bodegas that helped usher the storied region into the modern era in the early years of this century (though its roots reach back to its founding by D. Guillermo Hurtado de Amézaga, in…

The advantage Marco Simone has over other destination golf courses is that no other links have Rome, one of the world's most sophisticated and captivating luxury centers, just down the road. And the Eternal City is humming with openings, exhibitions and buzzy dining and imbibing spots-some of which, such as those below, merit a trip in their own right. Andrea Strafile STAY Rome is rediscovering true doloe vita-style hospitality, with the grand Via Veneto welcoming the recently opened W Hotel, spanning adjacent 19th-century palazzi, as well as the Rosewood when it opens in 2024. The begnning of 2023, however, belongs to Six Senses Rome. Its 96-room, UNESCOlisted 18th-century Palazzo Salviati Cesi Mellini, scheduled to open its doors in March, is spectacular even by the standards of one of the hottest…

FEW AMERICAN CITIES continue to boom during the pandemic quite like Miami. From Golden Beach to South Beach, Indian Creek to Coral Gables, the South Florida metropolis saw a surge of newcomers lured by its open spaces and tax-friendly business environment. How big was Miami's boom? Total home sales rose by around 50 percent in 2021, according to the Miami Association of Realtors, with median prices up nearly 20 percent from April 2021 to April 2022 alone. Unsurprisingly, much of Miami's market momentum has spilled over into neighboring cities, most notably Fort Lauderdale—the canal-filled boater haven just 30 miles north of Miami and famous worldwide for its annual must-visit International Boat Show. Bustling and breezy with a major airport connected to Europe, Canada, Latin America and most US markets, the…

DREAM MACHINES A DEVOTION TO MOTION Would you part with well over a million dollars for a hypercar powered by a Nissan V-6 engine? What if it's built by a company you've never heard of, in a country with no history of producing such high-performance vehicles? Praga, in the Czech Republic, hopes you might. Worth considering? Its Bohema model might represent one of the last chances to order a new hypercar powered solely by an internal-combustion engine. Praga is no upstart: In the 1930s, it made aircraft as well as more automobiles than Skoda and Tatra, the Central European nation's better-known carmakers, combined. But it is a start-up. Now in private ownership, its focus has shifted to race cars. The marque's first customized road-going hypercar has been designed and engineered…

TECH Prior to Bell Labs’ first working transistor in 1947, which ushered in the advent of semiconductor technology and the computer age, every long-distance telephone call, radio and television broadcast, radar signal and sound recording was made possible only through the ubiquitous vacuum tube. Developed from the electric light bulb in the first decade of the 20th centuiy, vacuum tubes were largely relegated to surplus stores by the 1960s—but even today they remain essential in industrial applications such as particle accelerators, MRI scanners and even microwave ovens. This amplification device also endures in music recording and reproduction, where tubes are championed by some designers, musicians and listeners for their sonic charms—ample enough to cause some to forswear the transistor amp forever. “The difference between tubes and transistors is like the…

FIELD NOTES In April of 2021, oddly beautiful images of vineyards in France, the rows illuminated by fire pots, bounced around the internet. From Chablis to the Jura and beyond, the mercury unseasonably plunged, frost moved in and widespread damage to vines threatened the vintage before it had even begun. Those fire pots were an attempt to heat the air surrounding the vines and prevent ice from forming and hardening. As a Texan wine producer told me, the problem is not so much global warming as it is global weirding. She couldn't have been more right. In October of 2022, my first book, Crushed: How a Changing Climate Is Altering the Way We Drink, was published. It explores how climate change—that global weirding—is impacting not just wines and spirits but…

THE GOODS THIS MONTH'S WHO, WHAT AND WEAR The art calendar is always chockablock with can't-miss museum exhibitions, biennales and international fairs, not to mention countless gallery shows that open each month. But 2023 promises to be especially teeming, as it's likely to be the first full year without Covid restrictions in most art capitals since 2019. While the fairs and biennales are probably already on your calendar, Robb Report has culled the major events to put in your diary now. Dia Art Foundation is known for collecting artists in depth and supporting their wildest imaginings—City, Michael Heizer's sprawling epic in the Nevada desert, and Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field in New Mexico come to mind. This month, Dia Beacon, the institution's massive space in a former Nabisco factory…

Green Bay Packer Aaron Rodgers is one of the finest quarterbacks in NFL history. He had the best touchdown-to-interception rating in the league through the 2010s, is second in the league's all-time regular-season career-passer rating list and is a four-time NFL MVP. A five-time winner of the Best NFL Player ESPY Award, he's almost certainly a future Hall of Famer, and despite nearing his 40th birthday, he continues to deliver the Packers to victory in a notoriously grueling sport. But football is hardly Rodgers's entire story. A deeply spiritual man, he's a conscientious listener and devoted student, and—as it turns out—an excellent Jeopardy host (he had a 10-day guest stint in 2021). You might see him in a State Farm ad or an episode of your favorite TV series such…

IT DEFINES LIVING LARGE. This newly completed 10th-floor mega-penthouse in West Hollywood's vibrant Arts and Design District sprawls across 6,451 square feet of interior space with an additional 1,489 square feet of terraces for a total of nearly 10,000 square feet of indoor-outdoor living. At the mere touch of a button, almost 300 linear feet of motorized, Swiss-engineered, triple-glazed Vitrocsa windows can power open to offer unobstructed, showstopping views of the distant San Gabriel Mountains, the Hollywood Hills and Century City. This East Penthouse-currently being listed off-market for a finger-in-the-wind $50 million-sits on top of the new 8899 Beverly tower, where buzzy Beverly Boulevard meets North Swall Drive. Seattle-based architectural powerhouse Olson Kundig-Bill Gates's firm of choice, which recently completed the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla.-was called in to…

UNLIKE IN THE natural world, where profound complexity often expresses itself within elegant design—think of the Fibonacci spiral found in a sunflower's center—the modern automotive landscape is mostly an expanse of mass-market homogeneity that has taken the form right out of function. Pagani Automobili, however, remains synonymous with exquisite engineering and artisanship. Christopher Pagani, head of marketing and son of founder Horacio Pagani, explains what fuels the boutique Italian automaker's approach and why its latest model—the 864 hp Utopia hypercar, which starts at just under $2 million, is limited to 99 examples and sold out a full year before launch—is a bit of a maverick. Viju Mathew Describe the ethos of Pagani. We consider it a combination of art and science. It's a philosophy that dates back to Leonardo da…

Twenty Years of “Just Wait Till You Drive That“ Robb Report's editors never could have imagined that what began as a casual gathering of a few pals and fun cars would grow into an internationally recognized automotive competition, held on two coasts and attended annually by hundreds of car enthusiasts over the course of several weeks—but here we are. Robb Report Car of the Year started 20 years ago with modest ambitions and nary a thought that it would develop into not just an eagerly anticipated date on our editorial calendar but also a storied tradition. Yet word got out, and just one year after the event's inception, things got serious. The pool of competitors expanded, our circle of judges widened, and car manufacturers took notice. Plus, we soon learned…

The night's first stars have started to glow ever so faintly in the big cloudless Western sky above. I twist my neck to take them in from the saddle of my horse. Just ahead of me, Creed Garnick removes his dusty cowboy hat and reclines, resting his head on his horse's back and making the saddle seem like the most comfortable lounge chair. The lifelong horseman and owner of 3 Spear Ranch, a 1,200-acre property in Dubois, Wyo., doesn't need to watch where he's going. He and his chestnut mare, X, ride as one. In the distance, the boom of an announcer's voice and an eruption of whoops and cheers break the silence and interrupt Garnick's stargazing reverie. He sits up, replaces his hat and gives X a kick as…