Gia Coppola's #Collection
You'll be finishing the bottle faster than Lisa can say Gah!
I vowed at the beginning of this project to never review a Francis Ford Coppola wine. It felt too on the nose, like saying your lucky number is 1 or having a UTI. It’s just too easy! I wanted to reach deeper into the cellar.
But then I heard about the #Collection, Coppola Winery’s collaboration with grand baby Gia.
I love heiresses. The French New Wave director Louis Malle’s grandson lives above me and his granddaughter lives below me. I am sandwiched between heiresses.
Coppola kin have been in the news recently after Sofia’s daughter posted a TikTok about getting grounded for trying to charter a helicopter to visit her camp friend. It’s been written about to death, but I bring it up for one reason: we all love the Coppolas. For some reason — I think it is the collision between the Corleone Family and the Coppolas themselves — we give these Italixn biddies a pass to celebrate their celebrity heritage.
And why can’t we let more celebrity children be Miu Miu ambassadors in peace? Think about what happens when we excise this class of middling celebrity offspring. I’m not talking about the try-hards, the Lily Rose Depps or the Patrick Schwartzeneggers of the world. I’m talking about the ones whose main job is Friend. You know the type: they probably have worked with Lena Dunham; they probably were too dumb to steer their parents’ connections into an Ivy League school and had to settle for creating their own major at NYU Gallatin (Eco-Politics and Crochet).
Having a mediocre child is the essence of glamour! It’s how we separate ourselves from monkeys. Mediocre children are the crown molding in the house of Celebrity. Without them, the modern farmhouse looks a bit drab. Let them read their poetry at the Nuyorican! Let them show their paintings at a Lower East Side gallery! To paraphrase: the first generation makes it, the second generation spends it and the third generation goes to Neue House.
Gia, at 36, was one of the first pilgrims to embark on this journey (we salute you too, Ally Hilfiger). Gia does just enough to be a public figure — directing two moderately-received films over the past decade and a few indie boy music videos — but not too much that she has to sacrifice Hanging Out By A Pool. One of my favorite things about her is that she went to Bard (obviously) and studied photography (obviously) until she "felt a little burnt out on taking pictures after years of churning out so many for classes.” I loooooove that a photography class exhausted Gia.
Here’s how I think the inception of the #Collection went: Gia sat on Francis’s lap and was like [J’amie Private School Girl voice] Zio Francis, me want to make natuwel wine :-) And then he was like what is that? And she was like can I at least have my Tumblr art on the bottle?
The #Collection launched in the summer of 2018. At the time of its launch, the chicas had the wind and the wine at their backs: as one blog wrote at the time, This Is THE Wine For Fashion Girls.
It is so funny thinking about Francis Ford Coppola saying the phrase “hashtag collection.” It’s funny because Gia does not seem so hashtag in her personal life. I sincerely think it was Francis who proposed the name being like, hashtags: kids will love that!
Gia’s wines have the trappings of every bottle you see at the cute little store. They come in liter jugs; have screw caps; and have Gia’s little pictures as labels. But they’re actually not natural wines. They’re just normal ass pesticide-y Coppola wines with better packaging.
As Gia said in a wine.com interview: “I wanted to make a wine that my friends would like, and the way we go about buying wines, which is so much about what the bottle looks like and about judging a book by its cover.” Lol
Despite being tired, Gia did manage to use three of her photographs for the wine’s labels. A close reading of these images reveals who Gia is as a person, I think.
The first, the #OverIt rosé, has a photo of a pastel pink landline alongside a newspaper scribbled with the word “God,” which she definitely wrote herself. A regular Nan Goldin.
Then there is the #Thirsty Red Blend, which has a photo of Linda Ramone’s fat cat Rusty. Gia has said Linda used to pick her up from high school and drive her around Beverly Hills. Come onnn.
Then there is my favorite, the #Selfish white blend, which has a photo of Nathalie Love (daughter of longtime Vogue West Coast editor Lisa Love), who Gia first met when they were cast in a Nick Cave music video at age 7. Gia explained the significance of the photo, taken when they were both 16: “we were interns at French Vogue in Paris. Nathalie had to model a collection for one of their spreads.” This Linda Ramone-French Vogue intern stuff is some deeply Bret Easton Ellis shit, you have to love it.
I tried the #Selfish white blend and it was … fine! A blend of Pinot Grigio, Viognier, Pinot Blanc, Vernaccia, and Vermentino, it was quite floral and lightly acidic in body, with some tropical notes of pineapple and honeyed apricot, rounded out by some lemon/lime. It was normal, passive wine it-girl wine.
But of course, it’s not about the wine. It’s about being at a picnic with a baguette, some hot girl tinned fish and a cheese you bought at Trader Joe’s because they have A rEallY gReaT SeLEctIoN oF BrIEs. So for that … there are probably better options.
Ciao bellas!