Every sip you take
Sting, rock star-turned-gentleman farmer, talks to Christopher Jackson about making wine and music, being part of a community and exactly what is going on in the world
THE highest tier of fame is all a question of entourage. Entering the top floor of Sting and Trudie Styler’s flat in London’s Battersea, I become swiftly acquainted with a private chef, a couple of PAS and a tense hush that I fear might have to do with a difficult personality. Eventually, having watched the power couple’s Michelin-star-style dinner prepared in monastic silence, I am shown through to a living room about the size of an Olympic swimming pool.
It turns out the pair have merely been on the radio. As I walk in, Sting breaks off from boyishly hugging his own raised knee to pour me a glass of Sister Moon—the celebrated wine from his own range.
‘Here you are, sir,’ he says, pouring it like a sommelier. Trudie asks politely how long I need for the interview. Thinking of my two-year-old son, I say I need to be home for bath time in a few hours. ‘You look quite clean,’ Sting jokes.
I say I need to be home for bath time. “You look quite clean,” Sting jokes
The room isn’t showy. There are eclectic rows of books—novels, poetry and nonfiction. A guitar leaning against a sofa invites the composition of a hit. The thing that’s most illustrative of fame and wealth is the view: the river snaking off towards Westminster in one direction and Fulham in the other.
The wine isn’t incidental; it’s the reason I’m here. For a few years now, it’s been possible to stay at the couple’s 865-acre estate, Tenuta Il Palagio, where they have a vineyard. ‘We had this fantasy about owning a house in Italy,’ Sting recalls. ‘After about 10 years of searching, we came across a ruin on the border of the Chianti area. It had a lot of land, a rundown vineyard and an olive grove.’
‘The size of the project was sometimes daunting,’ continues Trudie. ‘We started to do the house up—we had to tear the roof down and then completely rebuild it.’ Sting finishes his wife’s thought: ‘Trudie, being a farmer’s daughter, said we should do something with the vineyard.’
After a fortuitous meeting with the winemaker Alan York, the pair set about replanting and eventually produced the ‘layered and provocative’ (according to wine connoisseur James Suckling) liquid I am drinking now: the title is also a reference to the ‘100% biodynamic practices’ that the estate employs. ‘The goal was to create a wine that is unique,’ says Sting. ‘We had the right elevation to create a new fingerprint, which appealed to me because my life in music is all about that.’
It seems a reach to ask what relationship there might be between wine and song, but he answers the question easily. ‘Like a song, a wine has to have a story: a wine has a beginning, a middle and an end—and that narrative can be a complex or a simple one. I also believe strongly that the history of wine-growing is linked directly to the history of language. Have a glass of wine and you become more receptive to someone telling you a story.’
The family decamps to Italy for the whole of August. This initially seems an odd decision, given that it commits them to the highest heat of the year. ‘It happens to coincide with our wedding anniversary,’ Trudie explains. ‘We give this party and invite the entire community. Sting sings and we
have a pizza oven and we taste the wine. It’s a lovely evening that’s become part of the calendar.’
When I make my visit to the vineyard in June, I find a place so beautiful that, on arrival, I experience departure anxiety straightaway. There are ornate gardens full of rhythmic planting (I especially fall in love with the wallflowers by the pool); a lake you can swim in, presided over by a complex tree-house; and Tuscan cuisine lovingly cooked by an earthily wonderful Italian lady called Valentina. The operation is overseen with infectious warmth by Bina and Paolo Rossi, a formidably kind brotherand-sister team.
‘The community really embraced us,’ says Trudie. ‘They love the fact that we’re committed. I don’t know if you heard, but a local factory closed and Sting was kind enough to go and join the protests.’ Is Tuscany where they’re both happiest? Sting takes the question: ‘It’s an idealised life, isn’t it? We see the very best of it. We’re there for a couple of weeks and can drink until 2am, look at the stars and feel blessed.’
These feelings are reciprocated in the locality. Each member of staff makes a point of recounting tales of Sting and Trudie’s kindness: Sting, it seems, descends on the villa not as the intimidating rock star one might imagine, but as a sort of benevolent count (the place was previously owned by a duke, Simone Vincenzo Velluti Zati di San Clemente). There’s a sense in which Sting’s Tuscan incarnation can be seen as a kind of gentleman farmer. When I suggest this comparison to Paolo, he replies: ‘When Sting and Trudie came in, we had three workers —now, we have 20. It’s had a big economic impact in terms of salaries and families.’
Do they ever get any hassle? Sting shrugs. ‘We heard from the village that someone drove by and asked where we lived. Because the villagers know us and want us to have our privacy, they pointed the car in the wrong direction.’ When I ask Paolo to verify this story, he nods vigorously and laughs: ‘Si, si, si, si, si.’
In some respects, the musician is a difficult person to interview: Sting is so calm that I feel as if I’m trying to elicit information from an oak tree. His is also the kind of cool that brings out the blithering idiot in others. Even so, his Italian home is full of decisions that can compel a Zen mood from even a London journalist addicted to coffee: the art books in the cool, stonefloored, airy lounge; the original drawings by Jean Cocteau in one of the upper rooms. Even Sting’s gym is a converted chapel,
Like a song, a wine has to have a story