You don’t have to be a Hollywood power couple to make wine, but it doesn’t hurt to have them as active owners of the vines and the wine label.
A rosé known as Miraval Côtes de Provence was released online last week and the 500 cases (6,000 bottles) were snapped-up within five hours. The wine was produced from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s 500 hectare property near the town of Brignoles, about half-way between Aix-en-Provence and Cannes in the south of France. A further 100,000 bottles had been pre-sold to wine merchants and restaurants.
Pitt and Jolie join a queue of celebrities who have invested in wine. Others include Francis Ford Coppola – who has built an enormous and popular wine estate north of San Francisco - Madonna, Richard Gere, Drew Barrymore, David Beckham, Sting, Sam Neill, Dave Matthews, Antonio Banderas, Greg Norman and the Russian actor Gerard Depardieu.
Pitt and Jolie teamed with the Perrin family who own Château Beaucastel in the southern Rhone Valley, a winery famous for its Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The Perrin family pioneered organic viticulture in the 1950s.
Family spokesman, Marc Perrin, said the actors wanted to do more than just put their name on the label. They were active in attending blending sessions, switching to steel tanks and helping to develop a new shape and label for the bottle (pictured below).
“They want to be proud of the wine on their property,” Perrin said.
The first wine critic in the world to taste Miraval is Frenchman Thierry Desseauve who told Reuters that “it was a very good wine” giving it 91/100.
The wine sold online for a relatively modest $23/bottle. Miraval hopes to produce red and white wines in the future, with the first white wine expected by mid-year.
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