(Editorial team)
Norah Jones? When the name of the second most prominent singer of the late 1990s comes up today (the most prominent, incidentally, was Amy Winehouse), most people remember her fleeting on-screen kiss with Jude Law less than her music. She sang her biggest hit almost 25 years ago – Don’t Know Why. Does anyone still remember it? Hardly. The song has slipped into the background music of hotel lobbies, the artist into the diffuse half-light of nostalgia. And it is precisely there, in the shadow of past relevance, that she is now attempting a comeback – not with an album, but with a wine range.
„This Life“ is what the project is called. Together with the Icelandic pharmaceutical billionaire Róbert Wessman, who rose from “Viking boss” to château owner in Bergerac, she is now launching Crémant, rosé, and soon white and red wine. A range that sounds as shallow as a summer playlist algorithm. It was presented in the sparkling cellar setting of Château de Saint-Cernin: chandeliers, selfies, PR speak. More cheap James Bond than undiscovered Bergerac.
Yet wine is not made at press events, but from excellent grapes. I gather from the initial social-media reviews (and therefore not without reservations): there is nothing that particularly stands out or distinguishes itself from industrial wines. No sense of origin, no signature, just marketing perfume.
The pattern is familiar. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, for instance: their Miraval rosé became a cult (which it has long since ceased to be), not because it reinvented winemaking in Provence, but because the separation of the two Hollywood gods was the best campaign one could have wished for. A bottle of Miraval is less wine than relationship drama to be poured out.
Or Germany: Matthias Schweighöfer once put his own label on bottles that subsequently grinned at you from every supermarket shelf. This is not about wine; it is about the “nice bottle for Saturday evening” that can be paired with a streaming series. Well, that is not necessarily bad – but poor.
And then Gérard Depardieu – the godfather of all celebrity wines. Before he became Russian, he bought up wine from wineries across France, had mediocrity bottled by the hectolitre and was celebrated by feuilletonist bobos as a brilliant winemaker. Why? Because the “fat actor with a red-wine nose” had supposedly poured so much soul into every bottle. In reality, it was industrial insignificance, sold with the aura of an excessive genius and provocatively good photographs. But Depardieu’s wines were never more than theatrical thunder in a glass.
Of course, there is the exception: Sting in Tuscany. His Tenuta Il Palagio is a serious winery, run with craftsmanship, seriousness and respect for tradition. But he is the exception that makes all the others look weaker still.
And now, then, Norah Jones. “This Life”. Even the name sounds like a soft-focus coaching programme: everything, nothing, pleasingly tuneful. The wines? Nice. Inoffensive. Summery like tinned iced tea. No depth, no risk, no definition – so say the first voices online. A wine, or rather a product, that would rather ingratiate itself than ever make demands.
But is it not too late? Who is still getting into the wine business now? Answer: those who swim in a sea of wine are simply looking for new ways to get rid of that sea of wine. Anyone who buys a bottle of celebrity rosé is not acquiring wine, but the illusion of proximity. You drink the image, not the contents. The shelf display becomes a fan zone, the label a ticket. Meanwhile, genuine winegrowers struggle with weather caprices, with soils, with markets. But does anyone even still know Norah Jones? Exactly!
The truly tragic thing: These projects displace the stories of the real winegrowers. Instead of depth: surface sparkle. Instead of provenance: selfies in the château cellar.
Is it not gratifying, when wine, contrary to the zero campaigns, once again gains media space as a cultural asset? No: because this kind of wine is not culture, merely a poor imitation, but only an accessory in the Instagram shop of vanities – a drink that is probably as inconsequential as almost all celeb wines.