Oscars Luncheon Takes Brad Pitt's Side in Wine Dispute

Each year the Oscar nominees pack into a Los Angeles banquet hall in the weeks leading up to the ceremony to take a class photo and schmooze. They also eat lunch together, but that is usually not the point… until now.

New York Times reporter Kyle Buchanan posted a picture of the menu at today’s Oscar nominees luncheon, and if you read Page Six as much as I do, you might notice something interesting about the wine list.

Under “Wines,” below the chardonnay and pinot noir hailing from Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa vineyard, we find Fleur de Miraval. For the uninformed, Fleur de Miraval is a rosé champagne from the Miraval vineyard, located in Correns, France. According to one website specializing in imported French goods, the wine “expresses all the nobility of champagne with mineral, salty and even iodine notes, reminiscent of the chalk terroir of the estate.” Delicious.

But more important than the wine itself is who owns Miraval, and specifically who used to. Oscar winners Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie bought Château Miraval and its vineyard in 2008, and were married there in 2014. However, in 2021, Jolie sold off her 50 percent stake in the estate and its wine business to Russian businessman Yuri Shefler. Pitt is now suing his ex-wife for what he claims was an illegal sale of her stake of the business, saying that Jolie “consummated the purported sale without Pitt’s knowledge, denying Pitt the consent right she owed him and the right of first refusal her business entity owed his.”

It is, how you say, a very messy legal situation. Nevertheless, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences continued their perfect streak of bold political statements just three years after awarding Best Picture to Green Book.