From the Provençal Miraval Rosé to Fleur de Miraval rosé champagne and now the French Riviera–inspired Gardener Gin

Though the Famille Perrin is not yet a household name across the US, one of their wines—Miraval Rosé—has not only amassed widespread acclaim but attracted an exuberant American consumers base. It also redefined the rosé category along the way. Though produced in partnership with Brad Pitt, Miraval isn’t a celebrity endeavor. The Perrin family oversees the vines of Château Miraval, as well as the vinification process, bringing five generations of winemaking knowledge to each bottle. Pitt and the Perrin family expanded their partnership in 2020 with the release of the first edition of Fleur de Miraval rosé champagne, a collaboration with the lauded maison Pierre Péters. For the venture, which established the first-ever champagne house dedicated to rosé, the partners established a new process, blending a base of disgorged vintage chardonnay champagne with young pinot noir. Even more recently, the Famille Perrin and Pitt stepped into the world of spirits with the creation of The Gardener Gin, enlisting one legendary master distiller as their third partner. To learn more about all three developments, we sat down with Matthieu Perrin, co-owner of Famille Perrin and fifth generation winemaker.

Perhaps unexpectedly for a winemaking family, you launched a gin with your Miraval partners. Can you explain what brought this about?

You have to be a little bit of an entrepreneur when you are in winemaking, because every year you create a new wine. Every year you have to be engaged again. Sometimes we think about other projects, and we wonder, “should we do this?” Ultimately, the decision-maker is whether or not we think it will be a quality product. Quality is always first. For the gin, the idea was to embody the lifestyle, or what we call “art de vivre,” of the French Riviera by making a spirit that reflects the beauty and the diversity of Cannes, Saint-Tropez and Monaco.

There are three partners involved in Gardener Gin. What does each person bring?

We have known our Miraval partners for a long time. We have been partners with Brad at Miraval for more than 10 years now—since we started Miraval Provence together in 2012. Obviously, none of us are in the spirits world. We are winemakers. Brad is an artist. Together, we were looking for a third person to make a quality product. By chance, we met the most important guy on this project, Tom Nichol. He’s our master distiller. He was the master distiller of Tanqueray for 40 years.

Didn’t he create Tanqueray Ten?

Yes, he’s a gin legend. He’s a dream. He’s the celebrity of this project! Without Tom, we’d never go from wine to spirits. We call ourselves fire, land and sky. Fire is the master distiller, Tom. Land, it’s me and my family, a family of winemakers. Sky is Brad, an artist. At the end of the day, this gin is made by three people who should have never met in real life: a retired Scottish guy, someone from a family of French of winemakers in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and an artist based in Hollywood. It’s like Ocean’s Eleven.

Your gin is made from wheat that you grow. It’s also organic.

Yes. Regarding, organic, it’s in the DNA of my family thanks to my grandfather, Jacques Perrin, who was a visionary winemaker. He decided to make organic wines in 1954. He was one of the first. He decided to stop all the pesticide, insecticide, chemical products. In ’50s, the beginning of ’50s, there was this introduction of chemical products. Everybody thought it would be the future of farming—using pesticide, insecticide. Jacques did the opposite. Because of this, we had no choice when we decided to make our first spirit; it had to be organic.

When we met Tom, we were discussing the process of how to make a gin. We thought, at the beginning, that we’ll make a gin based on alcohol from our grapes. He made a face when I mentioned that and he said, “no way.” He said that quality gin has to be based on wheat, because it has to encapsulate the botanicals and to reflect the terroir. As a winemaker, what he was saying was obvious to me. Because of my grandfather, I then knew the wheat had to be organic. Tom had never done an organic gin before but he said “let’s do it!”

Let’s move on to your wines! Why is your family legacy so meaningful to you and why did you choose to be a part of winemaking?

You have to defend the terroir where you are born. Doing that in a family business changes your vision, I think. It’s probably the only job in the world where you talk about the vintage that your grandfather or your grandfather’s father has done, where you speak about the weather conditions in 1975. Sometimes you have to think about what you will get in 20 or 40 years because when you plant a new vineyard, most of the time, it’s not for you, it’s not for your child, but the child of your child. They will probably benefits from that. That means our relationship with time is unique.

Château Miraval is in Provence. Fleur de Miraval is from the Champagne region. Where did Famille Perrin begin?

We are from the Rhône Valley. The Rhône Valley has two different parts: the north of the Rhône Valley and the south of Rhône Valley. We are based in the south of the Rhône Valley, in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. It features a completely different variety of grapes than the north. It’s a continental climate in the north of the Rhône, as well, but it’s more Mediterranean climate in the south. It’s Provence.

In the south of Rhône, where you have Châteauneuf-du-Pape, that is where my family started to make wines. It was Château de Beaucastel first. From that, we developed what we call Famille Perrin. It’s a beautiful place because we have a lot of sun, of course. There’s quite a difference between night and day, in terms of temperature. Probably, the most important, is that we have the mistral, this very strong wind which comes from the north to the south and keeps clouds away. We could never produce the wines that we produce today without this mistral.

How did Brad Pitt enter the picture and why did you choose to take on that project?

My family had been talking about releasing a Provence rosé for a long time, but we never found the right project. We have been producing rosé as a family forever—and we are living in the place where rosé wines were born. We love rosé. It was also a complement to all the other wines we were producing. We we’re already in the Provence area, but not under the Côtes de Provence AOC. So, we discussed buying another winery.

We had a friend in common with Brad, Frank Pollaro, who is a furniture designer. He’s very well known for his design work, and he’s passionate about wines. When my family hosted a few wine events, he introduced to us to Brad. We discovered Miraval around this time and we fell in love. It’s one of the most beautiful properties you will ever see in your life, and one of the most amazing vineyards you can possibly imagine. They were looking for a consultant to help them with the property.

And, if we remember the story correctly, you said “we’re not consultants, we’re partners.”

We said, “You should come visit us and see what we do at Beaucastel. Let us explain our organic farming, and explain our vision for next-generation winemaking. We wanted to show how we put quality first. We also knew how to develop wine reputations in the US, because it’s a very important market for us. We have a winery in California named Tablas Creek. It was the first regenerative winery in US.

At the end of the day, we decided to create a joint venture between Château Miraval and my family—to bring our five generations of experience to Miraval, to take care of the vineyard, vinification, distribution, commercial development, marketing, and everything else. It was a dream for us to do this with our partners on this property.

Can you talk about the wines that you are making?

When we arrived, we tried to simplify the portfolio, to focus on one rosé wine in order to push the quality as far as possible. We decided to change the shape of the bottle, which is now iconic today. This is very much where everything began. Today, the most recent vintage of Miraval Rosé, which is a 2023, is a blend of grenache, syrah, cinsault and rolle varieties.

We also have STUDIO by Miraval, which we launched four years ago. The idea behind STUDIO by Miraval is to reflect the salt character of the Mediterranean Sea. The wind brings natural salt and natural minerality to our vineyards. We wanted to make something more casual, pure, fresh and elegant that reflectis.

It’s named STUDIO because it reflects the history of the property, which has a famous recording studio thanks to previous ownership under Monsieur Jacques Loussier, a very famous jazz composer. He brought plenty of artists to the property to be inspired by the place and to focus on creation. Pink Floyd came in the ’80s to record the totality of the album, The Wall. We had The Cranberries, ACDC, Sadé, Sting, thousands of artists.

12, 15 years ago, rosé was for summertime and you would not see it in fine dining establishments. Now, people drink rosé all year long and you go to the best restaurants and there is a rosé option. Do you think those are related? Do you think it’s a mentality shift?

Yes, of course. We think a lot about this. It was one of the main concerns when we started with Miraval. Rosé wasn’t a strong category. We are very proud that we’ve proven that it’s a category like sparkling wine, red wine and white wine, that is rooted in cuisine as much as it is in lifestyle. It also really breaks the rules. You can have it with an ice cube. It’s at restaurants, but also good for picnics. Sometimes people drink rosé as a way to celebrate. You celebrate your best friend who’s coming to visit you over the weekend. You celebrate the opening of outdoor terraces in New York City. Because the quality of rosé has been improved a lot these last 10 years, all of this combined explains its success.

Why launch the first ever rosé-only champagne house?

My family always says the same thing: we have no plan, but we also have no limit. We do things because we believe in them. Making the first house dedicated to rosé champagne, that produces only rosé champagne, it was not our plan in the beginning. My family and I, we are very good friends with Rodolphe Péters from Champagne Pierre Péters, which is a very, very exclusive boutique winery of the very best quality. Every time we visit each other, Rodolphe and I, we share good bottles. We test things, we try different things, and we discuss them all with passion.

Every time we tastedt the top cuvée produced from chardonnay, and then tasted the top cuvée from rosé, we were a little bit disappointed with the quality of the rosé. We saw that nobody spends 100% of their time to make rosé champagne, and nobody tries to push its quality as far as possible. We learned that most of the champagne champagne houses were producing 95% of blanc de blanc or blanc de noirs.

Ultimately, we wondered if we combined our two visions, we could develop something interesting. From a technical position, we thought maybe we had an opportunity to create something new by blending different vintages of chardonnay with our young pinot noir, using the expertise of Château Miraval with the expertise of Pierre Péters.

With such a process, you must be limited in how many bottles you can produce annually.

We only produce 20,000 bottle of Fleur de Miraval. As a new champagne house with no history, it has been very interesting to explore about how we can make something different and establish the DNA of a new house, by bringing forward the complexity and characteristics that we love so much in the vintage chardonnay.

Rodolphe had an amazing idea. He took all the vintages that he made. He took all the vintages of his father. He took all the vintages of his grandfather. He opened all these bottles and put them in a tank and he started doing another fermentation. It became evident to all of us that if we want to build a new vision for rosé, we should use this. Next to the young pinot noir, it provided this brioche character—which we all love so much from chardonnay. Then we went to other places to buy more vintages of chardonnay in bottles. We opened them and then we blended them with pinot noir in a Solera system.

We sourced three different wines to make Fleur de Miraval. It’s probably why we it has this complexity. It’s also why it is non-vintage. We have no vintage, but there is an edition every year. We have blended different vintages for each cycle. We call them ER1, and ER2, for Exclusively Rosé 1, Exclusively Rosé 2, and so on. It’s a very limited edition every year.

What is your hope for Fleur de Miraval? What is the dream for that vision?

It is the same as the one we had for Miraval Provence but now it’s to change the perception of rosé wines in the champagne category. It’s not about the success of the property. It’s not about the commercial points or the marketing campaigns. It’s really to help the category grow. The first year that we launched Miraval Provence, we were in the 100 best wines of the world according to Wine Spectator. It was the only rosé in the list. The following year, it was provided to first class passengers on Lufthansa flights. It was the first time that Lufthansa agreed to offer rosé wines in first class. Before that, it was only champagne and cognac. It opened doors for all the rosé wineries in Provence to grow and be different. We want want to do this with rosé champagne. We want to push the quality as far as possible. We don’t exactly know how, but we’ll continue to do it anyway.