By Darius Sanai
Editor in Chief

Ozone at the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong, the highest bar in the world, has a long row of bar stools along its floor to ceiling picture window. You settle on a stool, place your Mojito on the counter in front of you, and stare out at a view of… nothing much. Where is Hong Kong? You lower your sights and, far below you, is a meandering stretch of water lined by buildings. The city that takes your breath away with its architectural glamour from the ground is now so far beneath you, from the 118th floor, that it almost loses impact; I was reminded of looking at Paris from a helicopter once, and pondering that human achievement needs to be appreciated at the scale it was created on.

Why do we so love views, and in particular, bars with views? From London’s Shard, you can gaze down from any of three lively and extensive bars at sweeping views of the city, from floors in the mid-30s: a perfect height for admiring a low-rise city like London. In Dubai, you can head to the Burj-al-Arab’s top-floor bar, and perhaps you will be as disappointed as I was at the tawdry collection of plump men and sad Russian hookers desecrating a surreal vista over the inky Gulf. The Rainbow Room in New York is still the most atmospheric bar with a view in the world, wearing its Jazz Age history on its sleeve (and try drinking Martinis there during an electrical storm for a genuine out of body experience).

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And perhaps that – slipping out of reality – is why views and bars are so intimately attached. For these watering holes are all in the middle of man-made firmaments, cities aching with crowds and claustrophobia and high anxiety; just as a Beluga vodka Martini provides an escape from the everyday, so does a vista stretching along, above and away. Together, they are an irresistible combination.

And so it was at Ozone. Slowly, the eyes adjusted to the relief map of Hong Kong spread out far below. Even in the gallery facing oblivion, the lighting was (correctly) kept low, so you could start to pick out ships and landmark buildings. The crowd was lively: low on suffocating young gents in finance talking about money markets, high on a blend of skin colours and nationalities, out for fun, not for expenses. And, as a slightly disingenuous counterpoint, Ritz Carlton levels of service, which you somehow don’t associate with somewhere so…groovy. Cocktails and champagne whizzed through the crowds with old-fashioned efficiency and deference. My Moscow Mule was refreshing and long, made even more revitalising by a cool breeze blowing in from the open roof. At 490m altitude, it was a discernible couple of degrees less hot than Hong Kong below.

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You exit Ozone via the lobby of the Ritz, a surreal interlude of calm elegance, and outside, suddenly, Hong Kong towers over you again.

If Ozone looks down at the view, Aqua is the view. This spot, a kilometre or so from the Ritz, is on the 30th floor, some 88 floors below Ozone. Also in Kowloon, the fast-emerging half of the city across the water from the historic centre, the city centre of Hong Kong – known to locals as Central – is a bristling wall of multi-coloured towers. In the foreground, fishing boats, ferries and old Chinese junks chunter through the water, which is multi-coloured, from the reflections of the buildings facing. It is the urban equivalent of being in the heart of the Alps, except instead of glacier whites and granite greys, green, pink and silver neon light up the cityscape facing you and the water below.

If you can take your eyes off the view, you will note that Aqua takes its cocktails and food quite seriously. Less of a party spot than Ozone; more of a place for an aperitif that turns into a thoughtful dinner, with good friends. The Moscow Mule here packed a punch, with real ginger and a dab of mint, and one of my favourite vodkas, Ketel One, still made in an old gin pot still. It adds texture and class.

The chef’s selection of sushi came with an instruction not to ask for wasabi as it mars the flavour; the lobster, wagyu beef and toro nigiri were indeed delicate, buttery, nutty, gentle. For all the correct international conversation about human beings desecrating the planet, and the follies of modern urbanity, an evening at Aqua may lead you to conclude that humans are still capable of adding beauty, soul, and delight to the world. And that this bar high in the heart of Hong Kong is one of the very best places to appreciate that.

Meanwhile, a good friend tells me that the bars on the other side of the expanse of water are less spectacular, but more edgy. To be continued..

Ozone, Ritz Carlton, Hong Kong ritzcarlton.com; Aqua Spirit, Hong Kong aqua.com.hk

By Darius Sanai
Editor in Chief

On business in Italy, my route takes me along the coast of the Maremma, the beautiful and curiously unspoiled Tuscan coastlands. Combine the words Tuscany and Mediterranean and images of overcrowded beaches and packed rows of villas interspersed with batallions of ice-cream wielding middle-class children come to mind. But in reality, the Maremma, which stretches down from Pisa towards Rome, is one of the least-populated and least-touristed parts of Italy. Partly, this is because it used to be dominated by marshlands (and was once a malarial zone) and has little of the community history of the rest of Tuscany. But that changed 100 years ago, and the lack of tourism now is a mystery: there are beaches, the pineta (the long stone pine forest that wraps along the entire Mediterranean coast, when it is allowed to), picturesque hills, and now, no malaria.

What the Maremma does have, famously, if you are a wine lover, is some of the most interesting wines in the world. A few decades ago, Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, a member of the Tuscan wine aristocracy, planted vines here and created a wine called Sassicaia, which shocked the then conservative and inward-gazing world of wine. This was a wine from nowhere, which was of the quality of the Bordeaux first growths (the likes of Lafite and Latour). Was it a freak?

Sassicaia came from a sloping benchland called Bolgheri, between the sea and the wonderfully-named Colline Metallifere, the Metallic Hills, that border the area. To prove it wasn’t a freak, Incisa della Rochetta’s cousin, Ludovico Antinori (from a branch of the famed wine family, but not the main branch) planted his own wines nearby and in the early 1980s created another Bordeaux-style wine called Ornellaia. While not quite as celebrated as Sassicaia, it also make its mark at the top (or rather bottom) of the world’s wine lists.

There was a patch of land just outside the original domain of Ornellaia that Antinori planted to Merlot, one of the grapes of Bordeaux, and the dominant grape of two of Bordeaux’s legends, Chateau Petrus and Le Pin. Like a great patch of land in Burgundy, it was planted on a slope, slightly concave, with different soils and bordered by wild forests at the top. Like the land of Chateau Petrus, the soil was mainly clay. One day, Ornellaia’s owners decided to make a separate wine just out of grapes from this new vineyard, which was called Masseto, just for fun. The wine was so good, they have told me, that they decided to continue making it formally, in 1986.

And a legend was born, because Masseto is now the single wine of Italy that can take its place in the world’s private jets with the luxury brands of Bordeaux (Lafite, Petrus, etc) and California (Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, etc). There may be other wines of Italy which the professional wine tasters find equally good in some years, but they are obscure. Step into a restaurant in Moscow, Dubai or London and order a Masseto, and your companions, whether or not they are wine buffs, will know the card you have played.

“That is the middle part of the vineyard”, Axel Heinz tells me, inching along a sloped dirt track in his Audi. Heinz, handsome, articulate in several languages, and from some theoretical geographical combination of Germany and Bordeaux, is the winemaker for Masseto and Ornellaia, and has been for the past 10 years. “It is the grand cru of Masseto.” He is pointing to a slight hollow in the gentle slope, where grapes of a deep red hang from rows of green leaves. It’s just a vineyard, but I feel the same frisson as when walking the soils of Chambertin or La Landonne in France. The Mediterranean glistens in the middle distance, at its edge the delightfully empty beach by Bolgheri. Brooding forests rise towards the deep blue sky behind.

In the winery, a modernist building constructed in 1989 to blend into the earth, in a tasting room looking out over vines and hills and swathed in late summer sun, we taste some Massetos. The 2012, very young, remember, is deliciously, surprisingly open, broad, layered with bright fruit and cedar. It will be released to the world this autumn. The 2010 is older but tastes younger, more tannic, more closed, proud, just revealing hints of its couture gown from underneath a gabardine Burberry trenchcoat. I make a mental note not to drink the cases I have at home until 2020.

There are others, but the memorable wine, an astonishing wine, is the 2006. It has the breadth and openness of the 2012 but also a tunnel of depth, you can taste all kinds of bosky, subtle, sexy, bedroom-parlour touches and tones. These can only intensify over time. I make another mental note, to buy a case of the 2006 and drink a bottle a year over the next 12 years. Or to use it as perfume.

As I leave, I ask Heinz about the abandoned farm building next to the Masseto vineyard itself. It had been sealed off with fencing; a suggestion that there were plans afoot. “Yes, we are building Masseto’s own winery there,” he says. “Work starts this year and will be finished by the time we harvest the 2017 vintage”. So, Masseto is going it alone within the portfolio? “Yes,” he smiles. I see the flowering of a new, solo, luxury brand.

Darius Sanai

By Darius Sanai
Editor in Chief

One of the truisms of collecting, whether you are Imelda Marcos hoarding shoes or a 21^st century gentleman acquiring classic cars, is that enlightenment comes with possession. You research your subject, speak to fellow collectors, make an acquisition, and, through the circle of friendship and contact endowed by possession, acquire more and better knowledge.

Thus it was with my Ferrari Testarossa. The fabulous looking 1980s supercar is still being fettled to perfection by Joe Macari Ferrari, the celebrated London dealership. Joe Macari has the reputation as one of the most exacting, and most expensive, places to set your classic right. In the course of my conversations with their chief guru (gurus are essential in this game), Andrew Gill, head of aftersales and a man long-term Ferrari aficionados regard with awe, a new dream came into view.

It started when I told him , slightly playfully, that having acquired a Testarossa I was now interested in its successor, the 512 TR, a car that was basically an improved version of the Testarossa: looking just as beautiful (and almost identical), but better to drive. It is also, and this is important for a classic car’s value, rarer. There were 7177 Testarossas made (though mine is one of the 438 UK, right hand drive models), and just 2280 512TRs.

Forget the 512 TR, Andrew said: the 1995-1996 512M was the car to have. “Amazing car. They ironed out all the faults and they drive like nothing else.” Another friend, a very big and respected collector, gave it the nod also and said he’d even go halves with me if I found one.

The 512M was the final iteration of the Testarossa series, and one of the most outrageous looking Ferraris ever. It was given a dramatic aerodynamic makeover which divided opinion at the time (I remember thinking at the time it looked cool and fast, but no longer like a Testarossa) but now looks slick and modern, 20 years on. And its mechanical credentials were legendary. Essentially, the 512M was a racier, lighter, faster and more hi-tech version of the 512TR, down to the engine’s titanium alloy connecting rods and variable pitch valve springs.

 It was Ferrari’s flagship. When it came out, it was the fastest Ferrari and for a while the fastest car in the world. It was also a beast, the last mid-engined production 12-cylinder Ferrari, the end of a line that started with the 365 GT/4 Berlinetta Boxer in 1973, with all the flamboyance that implies. Its successors, from the 550 Maranello to today’s F12, all have engines in front and are far more sober looking.

And there were only 501 made, in the world. I really wanted one.

But where to find one? Calls to friends in the Ferrari universe saying I wanted one received replies of the “so does everyone else” variety. Someone knew of one coming from Japan; no, already been sold. A classic dealer had one advertised in southern Germany, but he wasn’t getting back to me and, no, sold weeks ago. A friend in Switzerland knew of a friend who had one, but values were going up and he wasn’t selling. One in Holland: but lots of miles and looked a bit tired. One at auction in London, but it was missing a lot of history. If you don’t have history, you have to take the mileage and the fact that it has been maintained properly on trust.

One evening, an ad popped up on an alert from an Italian website I subscribe to. Yellow 512M, great history and condition, low miles. I rang the number. “So sorry,” said the owner, a gentleman I would guess in his 70s. A dealer had seen the ad hours earlier, come over with cash (more than 200,000 euros in cash!) and taken the car. When dealers rush for cars, you know they’re hot.

Two days later, on a Friday, another alert, this time from a Spanish specialist site, a car in Barcelona. Pictures, obviously taken by an amateur, of a car on a sunny hillside. Ferrari Red (rosso corsa) with red and black carbon fibre racing bucket seats, a rare option. Only 12,000 miles, a 1995 car, always serviced at a main dealer. An even better car. I dropped the iPad and rang. “Yes, there are lots of people calling,” said a distinguished voice in Spanish. “Dealers, who don’t even speak Spanish!” (a disgusted tone). “I am going away until Tuesday night”. The ad only stated a landline, which meant nobody would get through to him until then.

I’ll meet you on Wednesday at 9am at the Ferrari dealership in Barcelona, I said, to get the car inspected and seal the deal. He agreed. Nobody would be able to get there before me, or would they?

On the Tuesday evening, I flew out to Barcelona and settled in at the Majestic. I had to finish some work, and then drank a couple of cocktails by the (closed) rooftop pool. What if he didn’t show up? What if someone else had managed to get hold of him and put a deposit down sight unseen on the phone, common with such desirable cars? What if the car was not as good as advertised? Did I really want to spend this money on a car which, until last year, had just been another old money pit? Was I ahead of the market or a sucker? A. wasn’t answering his phone.

At 9 the next day, A. (as I will call him) was there, besuited, with his 512M already up on a ramp at Ferrari Barcelona. It looked so clean and barely used, underneath and above. “We service all his Ferraris,” the mechanic told me. All? What others does he have? “A F50 and a 550 Maranello,” he said, naming more than a million euros worth of car. “And then there are all the Porsches and the Aston DB6 and the Rolls…”

A., a scion of Barcelona society in his late-sixties, was delightful. I looked over the car in detail, a list of tips in my hand from both Andrew Gill and the experts on the Ferrarichat online forum. We agreed a price, subject to a full formal inspection by the dealership. I gave him a copy of one of my magazines containing a feature I had written about Ferraris. He zoomed off and came back with a full set of bespoke Schedoni luggage for the car, which hadn’t been mentioned before (market value, more than £10,000). He threw it in for free. We left the 512M with the dealership and he took me for the finest paella I have had, and then a tour of his cars at his stunning modern hillside home (next to Neymar’s house) and in his storage garage. The 512M was neither the fastest or finest of his possessions. We spoke in a blend of French and Spanish, and I pondered that any English or German dealer who had rung A. would not have been able to communicate. He received several messages about enquiries about the car.

The dealership rang me. “We’re emailing the results through,” they said. These included a compression test, which doesn’t lie. It was perfect; as beautiful an example as you could dream of. We shook hands, I transferred the money and boarded a flight to Switzerland for a business meeting the next day, with the elegant gentlemen of Ferrari Barcelona looking after the car for us. A couple of weeks later, my 512M arrived in Britain. I entrusted it to Roger Collingwood of The Ferrari Centre in Kent, a former racing mechanic so honest he needs to be reminded by customers to send his invoices. It passed its UK inspections with flying colours and received a number plate.

I took the train out to Kent to drive it back to its London garage home. The flat-12 engine rumbled behind my ears like a pair of growling hunting dogs. The steering told you everything about the road and more – it has no power assistance and is heavy and astonishingly direct and real compared to today’s cars. The gearlever is grumpy and obstructive when cold but slashing it through the bare metal gate is a joy in itself on the go. The carbon fibre seats are amazingly comfortable. At speed, around corners, it feels on edge (with a big 12 cylinder engine behind you) alive like no modern car and just a little bit dangerous – it has no traction control of any kind, apart from the driver. And the howl when you take those lightweight pistons towards the top of the rev range is properly frightening – you feel this is why they made the car. Even idling, you are always aware of those two angry mastiffs behind you – I keep wondering if a superbike is dawdling by the rear three quarter flank of my car, only to realise it’s my own engine.

While it is now 20 years old and not as fast as any of today’s Ferraris, it feels very fast because it’s so raw, and it is still a properly quick supercar (200 mph, 0-60 in 4.1 seconds).

 Its value has also risen 50% in the six months since I bought it. A is happy, as I paid a strong price at the time; we went to his wedding last month. I don’t intend to sell it anytime soon; it is one of the greatest Ferraris ever made, and I recommend tracking down one of the remaining 500 or so in the world before the prices hit the moon.

Meanwhile, the bug hit again. The 512M’s successor, the 550 Maranello of 1997, was as different as it is possible to be: front engined, understated, wearing a Milanese suit rather than a Versace shirt and Gucci loafers. But a magnificent car, even more powerful, and apparently much easier to handle. Prices seemed very low. With two outrageous Ferraris for those Versace moments, I needed something sober suited and sleek: bespoke Zegna. Time to start looking for one.

(to be continued…)

Darius Sanai