“The War of the Rosé”: Pitt & Jolie’s Miraval dispute gets the Vanity Fair treatment

The dispute at the centre of the Chateau Miraval story between Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt has been covered by Vanity Fair, offering a fascinating insight into the rosé brand’s creation.

Written by contributing editor Mark Seal, the piece highlights the journey that Jolie and Pitt took to purchasing Miraval when they first saw the property and vineyard in 2007.

It explains the unusual story of how through a furniture maker, Frank Pollaro, the winery shifted radically. Pollaro, who had made a piece of furniture for Pitt and Jolie, was a wine enthusiast, and introduced Pitt, who he said “liked Heineken” to French wines.

Pollaro showed Pitt “a wine of legend”, which was Château de Beaucastel, Chateauneuf-du-Pape 1990, and was then tasked by Pitt with creating a shortlist of winemakers, which included Marc Perrin, who had produced the wine.

It reveals how Pitt and Pollaro drove to the Rhône Valley to meet with the Perrin family at Château de Beaucastel, and says “they toured the estate, and Perrin hosted a dinner with the family’s 90-year-old matriarch, who opened a bottle of Château de Beaucastel from 1963, Pitt’s birth year. As they got in the car to drive home, Pollaro recalls, “Brad said, ‘I think this is it.’”

Interestingly, the article also spoke to Miraval’s former owner Tom Bove, who disputes Pitt’s claim that the vineyard was losing half-a-million Euros a year when he took ownership of the estate.

Bove told Seal that he thought “Miraval was special” and Pitt “had enough money” and should “maintain the quality of the wine we were producing” which was around 150,000 bottles of “high-quality wine sold in very high-quality restaurants”.

He said that the move into 10 million bottles “wouldn’t have been my choice” but he admits “vineyards are like your babies and you always think your babies should go in a certain direction” – and also that with “the success that Miraval has had, commercially speaking, it was a brilliant idea to combine Brad and Angelina’s star power and the distribution skills of Perrin.”

The story then goes into detail about the current legal dispute with SPI Group and Yuri Shefler, Jolie and Pitt, concluding with a source from Miraval who said “everything was for the kids”.

• You can read the whole Vanity Fair article here.