First Kylie, now George Clooney: I’m a wine expert – here’s what I really think of ‘celebrity booze’

What do Kylie Minogue, Ian Botham, Graham Norton, Gordon Ramsay, Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt and Gary Barlow (to name a few) all have in common?

The answer is wine – and it’s not just that they like drinking it.

Celebrities are not known for not shying away from putting their names and faces to products and businesses: perfumes, restaurants, clothing lines… they’ll seize any opportunity to diversify their brand. But it currently seems that having your own line of wine is the ultimate celebrity endorsement.

But why are we so heavily influenced by celebrities? When it comes to buying wine, shouldn’t we care more about what’s in the bottle than whose name is on it?

The phenomenon of celebrity wine isn’t a new one. Francis Ford Coppola released “Rubicon” in 1978, a Bordeaux blend which would set you back £195 a bottle if you wanted to drink a current release today. Gary Barlow would’ve been more into fizzy pop and squash at that time.

Later A-listers to the wine party included Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who bought Château Miraval in 2008. This has grown it to one of the largest recognised premium wine brands globally, further propelling our desire for “pale pink”. Brangelina made rosé wine cool again, and we can’t stop lapping it up.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the number of celebrity brands exploded alongside the boom in social media – it becomes a lot easier to sell something if you’ve got millions of people following you. Whilst Idris Elba might not like to brag about his champagne brand Porte Noire, it’s hard not to when you have 6.5 million followers on Instagram.

Following in the footsteps of his good friend Brad Pitt, George Clooney looks set to release a rosé from his Provencal Domaine that he and his wife, Amal, bought in 2021. According to reports in the local newspaper Var Martin, Clooney will release a wine label from grapes grown at his Domaine de Canadel estate which was planted with four hectares of vines. But if George wants to make a dent in the market, he’d better find some more grapes – four hectares might make anything between 14,000 – 68,000 bottles, which is nothing in comparison to the scale of his fellow red carpet friends.

Since its launch in 2020, Kylie Minogue has sold over 10 million bottles of her wine. Her pink prosecco is the number one selling branded prosecco rosé in the UK, with £8.9m in sales – that’s 46 per cent bigger than its nearest competitor. These are staggering figures for a brand that was launched during a pandemic.

I actually have a soft spot for celebrity wines. Kylie talks about being “stung” by celebrity endorsements in the past, and wanting to have a much more hands-on approach in creating her range of wines, as she is a genuine wine lover. Kylie’s range even showcases lesser-known regions such as her Australian pinot noir from the Yarra Valley.

Similarly, Gary Barlow is committed to using only organic grapes for his wine range. Whilst I may not be cracking into a bottle of Barlow’s finest this weekend, I do admire his commitment to raising the profile of more sustainable viticultural practices. He’s not the only one – Avaline, the wine brand of Cameron Diaz, prides itself on listing all ingredients inside the bottle, on the bottle. This is a huge step, and such transparency is to be encouraged.

Whilst of course I would rather wine drinkers bought bottles from smaller producers, and sought advice from their local independent wine shop, the reality is that many people just pick up a bottle of wine along with the cat food, toilet paper and other groceries in their weekly shop. If you can see a name that you trust, such as that of a celebrity, that can be a starting point for a new relationship with wine.

And wine is facing a global crisis at the moment: wine consumption has fallen globally by about 6 per cent between 2017 and 2022, according to data published by OIV. Numbers of wine drinkers are falling, and unless a younger generation takes more interest in the good stuff, then that trend won’t be reversed any time soon.

Celebrity wines, whilst not my first tipple of choice, offer a trusting starting point for people to approach wine – and you never know, you may move on from Studio Miraval (regularly on offer at about £12) to a glorious Châteauneuf du Pape from Château de Beaucastel, both made by the same winemaking team.

Maybe I’ll raise a glass of Pol Roger champagne to that – it’s what Churchill used to drink after all…

Rosamund Hall (DipWSET) is a wine consultant and writer