Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and the grapes of wrath
The actress’s lawyers claim that her ex-husband’s interest in viniculture is an affectation. Hilary Rose asks what his Château Miraval neighbours — the makers of Whispering Angel — think
Once upon a time, two Hollywood film stars had a fairytale wedding at their chateau in the south of France and failed abysmally to live happily ever after. It’s perhaps grimly fitting, then, that seven years after she filed for divorce one of the last bones of contention between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie is Chateau Miraval.
While Pitt has spoken of his love for the place and the Provençal way of life, Jolie has sold her stake, allegedly without his permission or consent. Lawyers for her former investment company, Nouvel, accuse him of acting “like a petulant child” since. Describing his winemaking as an affectation, they claim that he engages “in illusions, not dirt and grapes”, and has been far too busy swanning around the world going to parties and premieres to get his hands dirty building the wine business. “While he no doubt visited the vineyards to admire the work of the French labourers who actually made the business successful, Pitt is no vigneron.” Ouch.
Except according to one of his neighbours and competitors, that isn’t the whole story. Sacha Lichine makes Whispering Angel, the rose produced an hour up the road from Miraval at Chateau d’Esclans. “He was smart enough to take in some real wine people to help him make his wine,” Lichine told me when we met at d’Esclans a few weeks ago. “There’s a vineyard in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Chateau de Beaucastel, which is owned by the Perrin family, and the Perrin family make excellent wines. The fact that they got involved with this celebrity endorsement …” he said, gesturing vaguely west to indicate Miraval, and that it’s a serious venture, not a celebrity toy.
“He could just lie by the pool,” he finished, “and the wine would still sell a little bit, or at least the first time, because of his celebrity endorsement. But it’s actually done quite well and become another brand in our category. There’s room for everybody.”
Like d’Esclans, Miraval occupies an entire valley. Forty miles east of Aix, it sprawls over 1,000 acres of vines, cypress and olive trees, lavender fields, a lake, a 35-room manor house and space to land a helicopter. Pitt and Jolie first saw it in 2007, when they went chateau shopping by helicopter with a local estate agent. Tom Bove, then Miraval’s owner, told Vanity Fair last month that he invited the happy couple to stay for lunch. “We’ll be back,” Pitt told him. “This is the first place we visited where Angie is smiling.” They rented it in 2008 and bought it in 2011 for euros 25 million. Bove agreed to carry on running the wine operation.
“I think at that moment Brad wasn’t really interested in making wine,” he said. “He liked the idea that he’d have a vineyard, but he really left the wine thing to me.”
That changed. By 2014, Pitt was describing himself as a farmer in Wine Spectator magazine, and a man in love with the beauty and peace of the Provençal countryside. “It’s the antithesis of the drive, the want, the need to get ahead indicative of life in Hollywood,” he said. “I’m instantly reminded what quiet sounds like. I love learning about the land and which field is most suitable for which grape, the drama of September and October: are we picking today? Where are the sugar levels? How is the acidity? Is it going to rain? It’s been a schooling for me. In the off months, I enjoy cleaning the forest and walking the land. Given my compulsive nature, if we are going to be in the wine business let’s make the best wine we can. Let’s approach it like a film and let’s make something we can be proud of.”
As Lichine pointed out, Pitt went into partnership with the Perrins. They were introduced by a mutual friend, a designer called Frank Pollaro whom Pitt commissioned to make a desk for Jolie when they were married. Pollaro flew to Miraval to install it personally, and told Pitt after dinner that his rose was OK but it wouldn’t win him any medals. According to Vanity Fair, a stung Pitt admitted that he didn’t know much about wine but was keen to learn. Pollaro duly drew up a shortlist of French winemakers who might be able to help him to improve the wine, but told Pitt he’d need to fly in from Los Angeles and chair the meetings himself. Nobody would bother flying to Provence to meet a designer, he said. Brad Pitt? Now you’re talking.
The Perrins came out on top, with Pitt describing how they “share the same values for authenticity and preserving nature and terroir”. The first bottles were stamped as being a Jolie-Pitt and Perrin production.
When the Jolie-Pitts bought Miraval, rose was still seen as a sweet, cheap, nasty option. Now, along with Whispering Angel, it’s in the vanguard of relaunching rose as a classy option worth spending good money on: both cost about pounds 20 a bottle. In May Miraval was named by Le Figaro magazine as “the most desirable Provence rose wine in the world”, coming in at No 1 in a ranking of the 33 best Provençal vineyards. Pitt and the Perrins recently launched a new gin, The Gardener, and a skincare line, La Domaine, using the seeds and skins left over from the winemaking process. Pitt claims to have been involved in its development too, “every step of the way, from choosing the name and the brand identity to testing the products”. While Jolie’s latest salvo alleges that “during the years he allegedly ‘built’ the business, he filmed and appeared in dozens of movies, not to mention making countless promotional appearances”, Matthieu Perrin, co-owner of Famille Perrin, said that Pitt has become ever more enamoured of the beauty and lifestyle of the Cote d’Azur. Like artists including Monet and Cezanne, “who were inspired by the French Riviera, Brad, too, fell in love with this way of life that exists nowhere else in the world”, Perrin said.
Last weekend, almost exactly nine years since he and Jolie got married, Pitt spent the weekend at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone looking like he didn’t have a care in the world. Filming scenes for his forthcoming Apple TV+ program about an ageing racing driver who returns for one last time to help a rookie, he looked improbably young and unworried about the many millions he’s still spending on lawyers. Vanity Fair reported that in 2021, four years after she filed for divorce, Jolie sent Pitt an email describing Miraval sadly, as “a place … where I thought I would grow old”. Pitt describes the place as his “passion”. And the only people who profit from the present dispute are the lawyers, to whom it means nothing at all. Perhaps one day they’ll make a film about it.
