What’s in a name? Celebrity wine…

(TheDrinksBusiness) - With more and more celebrities becoming involved in producing wines, Lucy Shaw asks whether smattering of star dust is enough to generate sales.

SEX SELLS. But then, so does celebrity. This March, the first 6,000 bottles of the inaugural vintage of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s Provence wine – Miraval Rosé 2012 – were snapped up within five hours of going on sale online. The news marked a turning point in the life of the celebrity wine. Formerly a curiosity and something to be sought out by super fans, the Jolie-Pitt effort and the resulting clamour to get hold of a bottle was more akin to the Chinese trying to buy up the Bordeaux first growths three years ago. Never before had there been such a fanfare of press attention and consumer interest in a celebrity wine. The fair price point of €15 a bottle helped. Jolie and Pitt decided against using their celebrity as an excuse to charge an extortionate price for their wine, unlike former NBA basketball star Yao Ming, who released the first vintage (2009) of his Yao Family Wines Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve onto the market last year at £390 a bottle.