For some celebrities, the grapevine is more than gossip – it’s a business.
Three new celebrity wines – from Bob Dylan, Carole Bouquet and Gerard Depardieu – debut in the U.S. next fall. Jazz musician Boz Scaggs’ wine will be on sale early next year.
And filmmaker Sofia Coppola now has her name on sparkling wine in hot pink soda cans you drink with a straw – made by her dad Francis Ford Coppola’s Niebaum-Coppola Estate Winery.
Stars from Sting to Robin Williams are buying up vineyards and lending their names to bottles.
It’s prestigious, fun – and potentially lucrative.
“These celebrities are serious about winemaking,” said Thomas Matthews, executive editor of Wine Spectator.
“It’s not just about what can they do after buying a house in Malibu. Winemaking is a daunting business. Few do it as a fad. They truly love wine.”
Winemaking is big business and growing all the time.
Overall wine sales in the U.S. were $21.6 billion last year – a record high – and California wines had 67 percent of the market share, said Gladys Horiuchi, spokeswoman for the California-based Wine Institute, a public policy advocacy group that represents the U.S. wine industry.
Horiuchi added that the wine business had a $33 billion economic impact on the State of California in 2000, the most recent figures available.
The allure of owning a vineyard – and the possibility of big profits – is what has attracted celebrities from Alex Trebek to Mario Andretti.
Francis Ford Coppola, the godfather of celebrity winemakers, has operated a California wine estate for 30 years.
Dylan’s wine, produced with Italian winemaker Antonio Terni, is called Planet Waves 2002, a blend of Montepulciano wine and merlot, named for Dylan’s 1974 album. It will sell in the U.S. next fall for $65 a bottle.
Bond girl Carole Bouquet, best known for her role in “For Your Eyes Only,” bought her first vineyard in 1994 in Pantelleria, Sicily, which she discovered through pal Isabella Rosselini.
She then bought -with Bernard Magrez – another vineyard in Lussac St. Emilion, the Bordeaux region of France, in 2002.
“It’s a labor of love,” Bouquet told The Post at Mix, the Alain Ducasse restaurant that sells her Passito di Pantelleria.