Andrew Jefford’s column Featuring guest star Kylie Minogue? Indeed

Last summer I was researching rosé, and thinking about the celebrity-wine phenomenon, much of it clustered around Provence rosé. It’s the perfect match. Provence rosé is aspirational, visually alluring and can be artfully packaged; and quality in rosé has a different meaning to quality in fine red and white wines. Forget about intensity, depth and concentration; great rosé is sublime understatement. And understatement can be created in quantity.

Then one hot day at a friend’s house, I met Xavier Roger, a son of Sancerre’s Jean-Max Roger. He runs the Carcassonne-based winesourcing business LGI Wines, and was helping out with Kylie Minogue’s mainly pink wine brand. Roger put me on to Paul Schaafsma, the genial Australian who helped build McGuigan Wines in the UK before heading up multinational Accolade, then setting up his own business, Benchmark Drinks, which specialises in partnering with celebrities: Sir Ian Botham, Graham Norton and now Kylie Minogue.

Through Schaafsma, I chatted with Minogue for half an hour recently about her wine. On Zoom, naturally: like many Australians, at the moment she’s marooned at home.

Decanter readers may be mildly suspicious of celebrity wines. You’re buying a famous person and their image rather than a beautiful drink imbued with a sense of place, right? Don’t hurry to conclusions, though. Minogue (2.2 million followers on Instagram and Twitter) has sold one million bottles of wine in the past year, many of them to people who have never drunk wine before. Through her Collection series, those new drinkers may come to appreciate the wines of Howard Park in Western Australia, de Bortoli in the Yarra Valley and Château Sainte Roseline in Côtes de Provence.

Some may even become Decanter readers – as Minogue herself has. ‘I’ve just signed up for Decanter,’ she said brightly, when Schaafsma told her about my role for the magazine.

The idea for a wine brand came to her when she was working in Nashville in summer 2017. ‘It was really hot, just swimming-through-theair hot. I said to one of my managers that I needed to get my resistance up, so we were going to have to drink rosé.’ They bonded with bottles of Whispering Angel over al fresco dinners, ‘and the thought dropped onto one of those dinner tables’. Eventually Minogue’s team approached Benchmark Drinks to talk about creating a wine brand – not knowing that Paul Schaafsma had written, at the top of his private list of celebrities he’d like to work with, ‘Kylie Minogue’.

She was feeling, she admitted, ‘nervous and intimidated’ when she arrived at the Benchmark office to begin looking at samples with Schaafsma and his team. ‘But they held my hand, and they listened to me when I tried to find a way to express myself.’ In the end, she found the whole tasting process ‘really exciting’: ‘I certainly never expected to be drinking wine for research, or thinking anything other than what is my response to this, and do I want another glass?’

Minogue is intrigued by the wine world.

‘The most overwhelming thing is how expansive it is,’ she says. ‘You open one door... then there are so many other doors. No matter how far you go, there’s always going to be more. But it’s totally thrilling to have a new project that’s also aeons old. I’m trying to catch up with people, but I’m also trying to bring other people in. It’s not been stressful – as so many other things are. It’s been pure delight. And we’ve done it during Covid. It was heartwarming to make something like that under such circumstances.’

You can find out what I thought of the wines over on Decanter.com (they’re good: no one’s trust is being abused here). Minogue’s genuinely involved; those helping her have done a good job; the wines are accessible, not ‘luxury’; she’s opening up the wine world to new palates. Anything wrong with that?