I drink every night. I don’t even know what clean living means!
She may have knocked back Cosmos in Sex And The City. But now 54 and a mother of three, SARAH JESSICA PARKER is happier taste-testing her new wine...
Sarah is to blame for me missing the dinner reservations I’d made for myself and my friend last night.
Two hours before our booking, we cracked open a bottle of SJP sauvignon blanc, her new wine produced in partnership with New Zealand-based wine merchants Invivo. The wine is very drinkable — dangerously so. at 13 per cent proof, it’s also pretty potent stuff (by contrast my current favourite white — a Vinho Verde from M&S is 10.5 per cent) and before we knew it, we had sunk the bottle and lost all track of time.
‘Oh, did you feel it was too strong?’ asks the lady herself sounding a tad concerned when she calls me from New York the next morning. ‘I hope you had time to chill it.’
I assure her that strong is good and, yes, we drank her wine cold and despite three glasses I didn’t wake to a pounding head (just a stroppy email from the restaurant about our no show.)
as she’s american, you might expect Sarah to work with a vineyard closer to home, but she feels this partnership, that’s been two years in the making, was fateful.
‘My husband and I had been buying Invivo wines in Ireland,’ she tells me.
Sarah, 54, and her actor husband Matthew Broderick, 57, have a holiday home in a remote village outside Donegal.
‘Our local SuperValu has a really nice selection of wine and we had been purchasing Invivo wines and we loved them.’
I admit to being caught off guard by the idea of one of the world’s biggest stars pushing a trolley around an Irish budget supermarket, but apparently needs must.
‘We can only cook when we’re in Ireland because there aren’t really restaurants where we are, so if people are at our home then we cook for them and serve them wine.’
Then two years ago a mutual friend introduced Sarah to rob Cameron and Tim Lightbourne, the men behind Invivo wine.
They sent her boxes of wine and over a series of phone conversations they discussed a collaboration. at first Sarah was reluctant.
‘What did I have to offer?’ But the opportunity to learn about the industry won her over and she agreed to get on board.
She’s yet to visit the vineyard in New Zealand (although she does intend to visit the country next year). Instead, samples of their 2019 vintage were brought to her and over three hours Sarah finalised the exact blend for her wine.
‘They harvested in March and came to New York for the tastings and we started blending in early May and here we are,’ she says sounding genuinely excited.
Hercharacter, Carrie Bradshaw, in Sex and The City was famously a Cosmopolitan cocktail girl, but wine is definitely Sarah Jessica Parker’s poison.
In these clean- living times, people may be surprised to learn that she enjoys a glass every night.
‘I don’t even know what clean living means,’ she insists. ‘Or “selfcare” or “self-care days” or any of that. I don’t understand. I’m like, “What? Clean living?” No, you just do your best,’ she says sounding refreshingly unhollywood.
Not that her daily wine habit means she’s dancing on tables or waking up with hangovers . . . or missing restaurant bookings.
‘I don’t drink out of a giant goblet every night — I’m not a big drinker. But my husband and I might have a glass of wine at dinner.
‘We have similar taste and people make fun of me because the glasses we drink out of are very small. They’re teeny little bistro glasses, old vintage ones from europe that we’ve had for years.
‘When friends come over it’s embarrassing because it seems like we’re being stingy, but it’s how we drink wine. That way you’re not overconsuming either.’
I could have done with some of those teeny glasses last night. SJP’s wine is the latest string to her bow and joins a range of perfumes, a highly successful footwear line, as well as a collection of gifts and accessories that include mobile phone covers and scented candles.
Today, her fortune is estimated at around £75 million, but she’s at pains to point out that the launch of her wine (there’s a rosé to follow and talk of a red) is not just another entry on an accomplished CV. after all, celebrity booze is big business at the moment with everyone from Brad Pitt and angelina Jolie to rapper Jay Z getting in on the act.
‘I don’t dabble,’ says SJP. ‘I want to be very clear about that. I am deeply involved in every single step of the wine’s production. The teeniest detail, the minutiae.
‘ I don’t put my name on something without being very involved. I mean down to the due diligence, the social compliance of companies, their backgrounds and histories and business practices.
‘I’ve also built a shoe company that’s very important to me and I’m very proud of how the company has grown. I’m in touch with the customer constantly. I’m in stores and on shop floors and in the stock room all the time. It’s a very personal experience.
‘It’s all significant in my life and I’m not cavalier about it. I take it all seriously.’
The success of her business ventures means she could afford to take her foot off the pedal if she wanted, but her taste for adventure hasn’t diminished in midlife.
‘ I’ve always been a curious person and that’s been true since childhood. I am interested in lots of things and as long as I’m given the opportunity to explore something new and be around people whom I admire and are good at what they do, then I’ll always be inclined to say yes.’
a further fashion line is in the offing, although ‘I can’t talk about it yet, sorry’.
From her dazzling appearances on the red carpet at events such as the annual Met Gala to her effortless off- screen style, she’s always been regarded as something of a fashion icon, although she insists she hates shopping.
‘I have had the same uniform for a while that suits every day and that’s grey jeans and a grey sweatshirt. I try to dress in what I deem to be appropriate for the occasion. I’m not a huge shopper — I haven’t been for decades as it always makes me slightly nervous. I know what I feel comfortable in and I haven’t observed a shift in that as I’ve got older.
‘I walk most places, I jump on the subway — that dictates what you wear, as does whether you’re dropping kids off at school or have to walk into a boardroom and present yourself.’
When it comes to her private life, Sarah has been married for 22 years to Broderick and is the mother to three children. James is 16 and her twin daughters Marion and Tabitha, born via a surrogate, are ten years old.
Fiercely protective and private about her family, she took the unusual step of taking to her Instagram account earlier this year to call out the constant gossip about her marriage.
ONThIS occasion, it was the american tabloid The National enquirer asking her to comment on what she said were false reports about her and Matthew arguing during a visit to London earlier this year.
‘Why not celebrate a marriage of 22 years and a relationship of 27 years?’ she wrote. ‘ Because, despite your endless harassment we are nearing three decades of love, commitment, respect, family
and home.’ Clearly not shy of controversy, three years ago the actress upset feminists everywhere by stating that she didn’t consider herself to be one: ‘I don’t think I qualify. I believe in women and I believe in equality, but I think there is so much that needs to be done that I don’t even want to separate it any more. I’m so tired of separation. I just want people to be treated equally.’
When I ask her what she hopes her generation will change for her daughters’, she touches on the subject again.
‘Well, we all thought that our mother’s generation had changed things significantly for women and we’ve discovered it wasn’t quite as radical a shift as we had hoped. There’s been some delusion about that.
‘But it’s hard to imagine that the past couple of years won’t be significant in our daughters’ lives in lots of ways.’
Is she talking about #MeToo, I wonder? Earlier in the year, she revealed that she once reported an unnamed male movie star for inappropriate behaviour towards her on set.
‘#MeToo, yes, and just the way we look at each other and people that are different and how we behave and what feels right and safe and respectful, how we value people’s contributions whether they are a server in a restaurant or a female conductor of a symphony. I don’t suppose we will understand the outcome for a while, but it’s hard to think that what’s happening now won’t change my daughters’ lives for the better.’
Her production company is staffed entirely by women and she works alongside nine women at the footwear company.
Throughout our chat she strikes me as very much a woman’s woman — someone you’d want to share that bottle of sauvignon blanc with.
Her Sex And The City co-star Kim Cattrall, who played the sexcrazed Samantha, is unlikely to agree, however. Last year, things erupted when Sarah offered, on Instagram, her condolences to Kim following the death of her brother. Kim responded angrily stating: ‘You are not my family, you are not my friend. So I’m writing to tell you to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your “nice girl” persona.’
Sarah admitted Kim’s words left her ‘heartbroken’. She took the higher ground when she refused to refer to their disagreement as a ‘catfight’ stating: ‘I have never uttered an unkind, unsupportive, unfriendly word . . . I’ve always held Kim’s work in high regard.’
KINDNESS is a word that pops up a lot in our conversation.
It’s a big theme with SJP and one of the reasons she walked away from Twitter five years ago. ‘ I found it to be terrifying. It was just an opportunity for people to scream at one another and use vulgar language and be unkind.’
She certainly practises what she preaches. She’s full of apologies when she has to step away from our call for a couple of minutes to speak to an assistant and is gushing when we have a rather surreal discussion about Timpson, the British shoe repair and key cutting company.
On an Instagram post earlier in the year, she had raved about the service she’d got at Timpson’s little kiosk at High Street Kensington Tube station. I tell her I know the branch well and get my keys cut there.
‘Oh my God, I love that place! A place that is doing proper shoe repairs is so good to see.’ She describes it as her ‘favourite wee shop in London.’ Eat your heart out Manolo Blahnik.
We end our chat with SJP wishing me a lovely day and saying that she hopes I get to enjoy some more of her wine.
I do, too — although for the sake of my health, I’d better invest in some of those teeny glasses.