If you’ve ever despaired at the cultural wedge that the world of wine insists on driving between the great and the good and the rest of us, consider your troubles over: Meghan Markle has made her latest contribution to the world with a Californian rosé named As Ever. A fund for the homeless or school building programme is surely in the pipeline.
It's a peculiar choice, given that her blog, The Tig, was named after Markle's favourite wine, Tignanello — a red. But this new Napa Valley juice is, press material insists, characterised by a flavour profile of stone fruit and gentle minerality. It has the required lasting finish, and is a Goldilocks blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and petit verdot grapes. It is “infused with joy and whimsy,” said Markle. Who needs a WSET qualification when you can just say things like this?
I should have seen this coming with the release of With Love, Meghan, a Netflix-sponsored tour de force of bone idleness that the Duchess seemed convinced would have the masses falling over themselves in admiration for chopping fruit and arranging it like a nice rainbow. Or revealing a recipe for jam that actually turned out to be made in a factory, 2,000 miles from her mansion home. The same factory that puts together her £9 packs of tea.
If you ask me, the most delicious thing she made was the mistake of inadvertently confirming what surely many of us suspected: that the Duchess is a wealthy person with main character syndrome role playing what she imagines life to be like for the plebs. Proof that, even with so much time on her hands to dream up what she fancies doing, she seemingly still can’t be arsed and so phones it in.
The wine is sourced similarly close to home to the jam, a mere six-hour drive away. Why here? Markle wanted to work with Fairwinds Estate, which was all but destroyed in the 2020 wildfires. A nice move, granted, as according to the Daily Mail, “she wanted to lean in and help a California business rebuild.”
But Fairwinds is hardly a small time producer. Since the fires — devastating, true — the place pivoted to producing wines for celebrities. On their books are Barry Manilow and the TV show Yellowstone. They even make wines for sports teams.
So was this deliberate choice by Markle to show support for a once beleaguered producer — or did she just look up places that bottle wine for the famous? It’s not a novel idea; companies like Benchmark Wines specialise in bottling celebrity plonk with Kylie Minogue, Gary Barlow, Gordon Ramsay, Graham Norton and Sarah Jessica Parker all on its roster.
Still, sources insist Meghan involved herself in every aspect of the wine. “Every time she had friends over she would test the different blends out on them and then give notes back to the expert winemaker that it needed more of this, or less of that,” the source said. “This is a custom-made wine.” She’s even used her own handwriting for the label.
How involved with the wine do you actually want Markle to be? Is she really the person whose taste you trust?
It begs the question: how involved with the wine do you actually want Markle to be? Is she really the person whose taste you trust? It’s not as though With Love, Megan — “the Live, Laugh, Love of TV shows,” as the Standard put it — revealed her to be a master in the kitchen: one of her recipes was to add olive oil to hummus. At another point she said “goodnight, sweetheart” as she put a cake in the oven. You can see her now in the vineyards, pirouetting between the grapes and whispering words of projected earnings.
Perhaps Meghan’s eye for detail isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either, with the launch date for the wine being July 1. The same July 1 that would have been the 64th birthday of Princess Diana. The same Princess Diana who would have been her mother-in-law, had she not been killed by a drunk driver.
But in the world of wine where winemakers and vineyards can date back generations, to those who make its consumption a vocation, devoting years of their life and paying handsomely for the privilege of the “sommelier” title, what place does celebrity wine have?
Many celebrities get into wine because it’s something they claim to have a love of, but it often seems more like an industrialisation of clout; of diversifying their income streams under the guise of a passion project. Celebrities will often play on the elitism associated with the world of wine, positioning themselves as a conduit between it and the consumer. There is an irony here.
Let’s assume the wine is good and we believe that Meghan harbours a deep affection for the art of winemaking; the Duchess has painted herself into a corner. On the one hand, the cult of celebrity upon which her burgeoning empire is built will likely generate enough sales to validate all her Hard Work™ but on the other, she’ll have to reconcile the likelihood of people buying it for the name alone. But here’s the rub: none of this is a life or death matter. It’s an indulgence rather than having any actual skin in the game. You might even call it a cash grab.
As Ever is set for release on July 1
