Brad Pitt to launch a French Riviera gin at Cannes Film Festival

Movie star and film producer Brad Pitt, who owns Château Miraval, has launched his first gin in collaboration with the Perrin Family and distilling legend Tom Nichol, which will be launched at the reopening of the famed Carlton Hotel during the Cannes Film Festival next week.

The Gardener Gin is a return to the classic London Dry Gin style, which the company said also “celebrates the lushness and light of French Riviera with a fresh citrus taste”, reflecting the art-de-vivre of the famous French region. Made from wheat in copper stills, it combines traditional botanicals juniper, liquorice, angelica and coriander with pink grapefruit, bright lemon and sweet and bitter orange from the Cap d’Antibes area.

“It is a melding of lush greens and brilliant golds, laced through with an unconventional blend of both fresh and dry citruses,” the company said. “Radiating the French Riviera spirit around the world, The Gardener Gin celebrates an incomparable Night & Day art-de-vivre that the exceptional Cannes Festival has embodied for over half a century.”

Co-founder Matthieu Perrin said that the light of the French Riviera was its “lifeblood”.

“Here, in this place blessed by the gods, the earth is tended by The Gardener. The Gardener works in harmony with the shifts of the season, the exchange of warmth and cold, the pleasures of living well. With the wisdom of experience, the gift of intuition, the whim of experimentation, The Gardener builds a recipe that combines the mystery of nature with the
pleasure of knowledge. The Gardener tends earth, time, all the while guarding a way of life that exists nowhere else in the world.”

Nichol forged a distinguished 42-year career as a master distiller, becoming the Master Distiller for Tanqueray Nº Ten in 2006, before he retired from the industry in 2015, receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gin Guild. However, since then he has continued to work on small batch gin collaborations, such as creating a Downtown Abbey gin at the distillery he co-owns, Harrogate Tipple, a gin in honour of architect Sir Christopher Wren with The City of London Distillery and expression with Kansas-based distillery J Rieger & Co. According to People magazine, he was tempted into the secret, two-year long collaboration with Pitt and Perrin by the opportunity to create the gin he “always dreamed of.”

Brad Pitt bought the 400 hectare Provençal estate Château Miraval in 2008 with his ex-wife Angelina Jolie, launching the Miraval Cotes de Provence Rosé in 2012, which has won critical acclaim and multiple listing, followed by followed by Studio by Miraval in 2019. However, following their split in 2016, the couple have fought an increasingly bitter legal battle over the estate, with Jolie eventually selling her stake in Château Miraval to Tenute del Mondo – a subsidiary of the Stoli Group – in October 2021 for an undisclosed sum.

Pitt launched a rosé Champagne brand Fleur de Miraval in collaboration with the Rhone-based Perrin and Champagne-based Péters families in October 2020, which was served at the Oscars in 2022.

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