SEEKING WHERE OTHERS AREN’T | Kermit Lynch at his wine store in Berkeley, Calif.

MORE THAN 20 YEARS AGO, Kermit Lynch wrote what may be the best book on the wine business. Equal parts professional insight and Henry James-inspired travelogue, “Adventures on the Wine Route” was not only much praised but has never been out of print.

Mr. Lynch’s take on all this? “I made a huge mistake commercially; I wrote a book explaining what I do,” he said over a late-morning glass of Muscadet at Balthazar restaurant in New York. It was a classic Kermit Lynch remark: a bit wry, a bit curmudgeonly and a bit true as well.

Oenofile: The Best of Lynch

Mr. Lynch has been a Berkeley, Calif.-based wine retailer and wine importer for 40 years. (In California, unlike most other states, it’s possible to be both.) And while Mr. Lynch has a lot more competition than he did when he started out (including a few importers who have written books as well), a bottle of wine bearing the Kermit Lynch name is practically a quality guarantee.

Although he once imported wines from all over the world, Mr. Lynch now focuses entirely on small, family-owned estates in Italy and France. “You can’t really dig too deeply if you try to cover the world,” said Mr. Lynch, who estimates that he imports the wines of around 150 producers, and is always looking for more. For every 100 producers he visits, Mr. Lynch might add a single one to his portfolio. His most recent addition was the Sicilian winery Riofavara.

 

Erin Kunkel for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Lynch’s shop

He first tasted a Riofavara wine over a lunch in Sicily with chef Alice Waters and Aubert de Villaine, the proprietor of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. (Mr. Lynch discovered one of his most important producers, Domaine Tempier, in the company of Ms. Waters many years ago at her restaurant Chez Panisse.) The Riofavara wines have been an immediate success, Mr. Lynch said. A little-known Sicilian wine would never have taken off so quickly years ago, he added, but today “people are willing to taste and judge.”

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Thirty-five years after Alvy Singer obsessed over the universe’s inevitable expansion in “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen is still grappling with the transience of life in his films. In “To Rome With Love,” which opens June 22, he co-stars as a reluctantly retired American opera director who tries to resurrect his former career by convincing his daughter’s future father-in-law—an Italian mortician who happens to sing well in the shower—that he could be a star.

The movie, the director’s 45th feature film, also marks Mr. Allen’s first appearance in front of the camera since 2006’s “Scoop,” in which he played a magician-turned-amateur-sleuth. “I’m too old now, is the problem. I like to get the girl,” said Mr. Allen, a spry 76, adding that his lack of credibility as a romantic lead “is a sad, terrible pill to swallow.”

In the film, the classic neurotic male role that a younger Mr. Allen would have snapped up for himself is that of Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), an architecture student who falls for Monica (Ellen Page), the charmingly crazy friend of his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig). Ms. Page’s character complains of “Ozymandias melancholia,” a bogus diagnosis inspired by a Shelley poem about an eroding monument. (Mr. Allen invented it for his character in 1980’s “Stardust Memories” but says he suffers from it, too.)

To distract himself from the fact that even great art will eventually fade into the past, Mr. Allen tries to stay focused on the present, making movies—one a year—watching sports, practicing clarinet and spending time with his family. He’s currently preparing to shoot his next movie in New York and San Francisco. In his editing room on New York’s Upper East Side, he spoke about why he’s making so many films in Europe, how he picks his actors and why his characters don’t text. An edited transcript:

How did you decide that you wanted to set your recent films in London, Paris, Rome or wherever?

Well, the Italians call and say, “We want to pay for it.” It’s strictly economics. It started with “Match Point.” I wrote that film, and it was originally going to be about a family in New York, in Long Island and Palm Beach. But it was expensive to do in New York. And they called me from London and said, “Would you like to make a movie here? We’ll pay for it.” And so I said, “Yes.” It was very easy to anglicize it. From then on, other countries call up and invite me to make movies, which is great because they don’t invite me in the United States. What happens in Europe, in South America, in China and Russia—all these countries call me and say, “Would you make a movie here if we financed it?”

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As an interesting and intriguing man I imagine you have a few techniques to impress and attract women. However, if your approach involves buying her a beer and telling her all about your fantasy football team, you may want to reconsider your style. If your ultimate goal is win, continuously impress, and keep the heart of a beautiful and intelligent woman you are going to need MUCH more, you’ll need subtle and useful skills. When I refer to intelligent women I don’t mean a woman with the highest IQ and barely any social skills, but a woman who finds stimulation in an intelligent, even intellectual conversation; who is cultured, confident and has a well considered point of view. A smart woman appreciates a man who can hold a conversation, who’s not afraid to show his culinary skills; one who is humorous, charismatic, and sensitive to her opinions and feelings. Nonetheless, that’s not to say a smart woman is not attracted to good-looking men. Every woman appreciates a man who spends time taking care of himself –and I don’t mean spending an entire day at the spa- but… it may just be that dressing well and learning to master the basic grooming habits can go a long way. In my new column – Ask Alexa, I will be offering you the advice you need to become an 18/8 man, that man who is well-versed and cultured, who knows how to impress and captivate a smart woman, and who wants to be the best that he can be. - Alexa

Many of us have had the distinct privilege of having brushed up against greatness.  The lucky few absorb these chance encounters and mix with their own alchemy to become great. 

My recent visit to the Deibenkorn exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Contemporary Art conjured up wonderful, rich memories of my brush with greatness, and of the time I spent with Richard Deibenkorn in 1974.  Although I was a young scholarship student at Art Center College of Design, when Deibenkorn was my painting instructor, I sensed something fantastic about this artist.  Richard Deibenkorn had caught the imagination and endorsement of the world art scene with his ‘Ocean Park Series’.  A painter’s painter, the series, inspired from his view of the dilapidated Ocean Park was pure poetry on canvas.  A tall, six foot five, shy, introverted quiet man, with a slight stoop, and a brushy mustache, looking like a bundle of fine paint brushes, worked patiently with his students by suggesting approaches to applying paint and color.  Or, he would coax from the students their feelings and what they were trying to say.

At the time, Deibenkorn’s paintings, if you could buy one, sold for less than $20,000.  Not a small amount of money then.  Today, a piece from the Ocean Park Series sells for between $5 million to $10 million.

If you love art, love great art, then you must seek out any opportunity to see The Ocean Park series up close. - Scott

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series is the first major museum exhibition to explore the artist’s most celebrated series created from 1967 to 1988. Recognized as a leading West Coast Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Diebenkorn turned his attention to figurative painting in 1955 and achieved equal success in this alternate style. In 1967 he returned to abstraction, and during the next twenty years would forge one of the most compelling and masterful bodies of work of the 20th century: the Ocean Park series. Featuring approximately 80 works—including paintings, prints, drawings, and collages—this exhibition captures Diebenkorn’s practice of working simultaneously in diverse media and provides audiences with the first opportunity to explore the complexity of Diebenkorn’s artistic and aesthetic concerns in this seminal body of work.

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