The secrets behind the Kylie Minogue wine brand’s meteoric success
When Kylie Minogue went to the ProWein industry fair in Düsseldorf, hospitality professionals were stunned to find her on the sales floor rather than in some backstage dressing room. Minogue was fitting in up to 18 meetings per day, sitting down with distributors to discuss deals for her Kylie Wine range. The relentlessness of her schedule meant the star stuck to zero percent.
“It’s such a busy fair, you can’t afford to be off your game,” says Paul Schaafsma, Managing Director at Benchmark Drinks, the company producing her blend. Kylie Minogue in back-to-back meetings is a surreal thought. You don’t exactly imagine the singer, who attracted the largest ever Pyramid Stage crowd at Glastonbury in 2022, to be striking deals with German supermarkets in her spare time. But she’s involved with her wine brand on a granular level. Some of the best ideas are struck up while her and Schaafsma, who is speaking to Morning Wire, are driving between business meetings in random parts of the world.
“When she was doing her residency in Las Vegas we had a trip to the southern Rhone to see distributors. We were meeting 100 sales reps and we had a great chat in the car on the way there about the things we needed to get done,” he says. “Some of the best ideas come from casual conversations.” When they aren’t together the work continues, much like for the rest of us, “pretty much on WhatsApp.”
She became the first woman to top the album chart across five decades and has fans ranging from their 20s to their senior years. With the release of Padam Padam in 2023, she re-established herself as a relevant pop artist once again. There are very few musicians that can say they’ve enjoyed Kylie’s contemporaneity and her diverse range of fans make for a perfect proposition to Schaafsma’s Benchmark Drinks. Entry level bottles of Kylie Wine cost under £8 and the highest end of the range goes up to beyond double that. Next, more premium bottles in smaller runs are on the cards for Kylie Wine’s fifth anniversary and Schaafsma doesn’t rule out a small run of champagne.
‘Kylie Minogue has an exceptional palette – she knows what she likes’
“Look, we’ve talked about little batches of specific products, just a small allocation,” he says, showing me a bottle on the shelf in his Wandsworth office from an earlier small run that has a multicoloured floral display. “There might be something coming that is a little like this.”
The wine journey has mirrored Kylie Minogue’s sonic success: Kylie Wine’s signature rosé is the best-selling branded rose in the UK and the brand has won gold awards three times at the Drinks Business Wine Awards. Industry insiders admit the product stands out against other celebrity-branded products because of Minogue’s involvement and the expertise of the blenders; the rosé is made by Sainte Marguerite in Provence, one of the region’s finest producers and the house behind Idris Elba’s blend.
The wine industry is its own worst enemy. Traditionalists have to embrace new methods of production
As the man who launched Graham Norton and Gary Barlow’s bottles, is there an A-List celeb Schaafsma would refuse to make some wine for? “Yes, I have said no to a lot of people. We get a lot of requests. The person involved, a celebrity or whatever, has to be passionate.”
We live in a world where famous names have been called out on live television for not being able to describe the contents of the books they’ve supposedly written. Famous faces sell, and Schaafsma – who has 25 years of experience leading teams at Hardys and McGuigan – admits this. “Celebrity wine probably can have more stones thrown at it than any other wine product,” he says. “People are naturally cynical to say, ‘What does Kylie Minogue know about wine?’ Well, actually, she has an incredible palette and she’s been to all these wine regions and she knows what she likes. Which is probably ninety percent of what wine’s about: knowing what you like, reflecting that in your product.”
It’s not just what’s in the bottle: as for the glassware itself, some have Kylie’s signature engraved into the glass and others have the word ‘lovers’ etched onto the bottles in homage to Minogue’s fans, who call themselves The Lovers. “It’s to say thank you,” says Schaafsma. “Her attention to detail is just extraordinary.”
When it comes to listening to her fans’ requests, one of them has surely been alcohol free products. More Brits across all age groups are drinking less than ever, as the zebra striping and Dry January movements continue to inspire more of us to consider a healthier approach. Minogue now has two alcohol free products; like its boozy forefather, the rose is the best-selling branded bottle in the UK. Schaafsma sounds moderately angry when he gets onto the topic of alcohol free wine, and is insistent that the broader industry desperately needs to catch up with the non-alcoholic scene happening in beer and spirits.
“The wine industry is its worst enemy,” he says. “The irony is the wine industry is reluctant to move to zero percent because the wine purists think wine has to be fermented with yeast and has to have alcohol. They’re starting with a wine product and they’re trying to convert it into something it’s not. What we’re saying is let’s try and create the best product for the consumer first and forget about the tradition. Forget about how your grandfather’s grandfather made wine. Forget about technology that’s stripping out alcohol from the wine that actually doesn’t really make it taste good. It’s counter intuitive to the whole process.
“The industry’s got to embrace that this is a drink, and get away from this whole idea that if you ferment it in that way it’s not really wine. Does the consumer have that conversation? No! They pick something up and want it to taste good. As soon as the wine industry can get over themselves and actually start realising that the product needs to taste good I think it’ll do very well. It’s getting past those gate keepers who almost want to hold onto the past. Zero percent could be 10-15 per cent of the wine industry, and I say fantastic. Zebra striping and moderation isn’t going away.
“The industry has to embrace new methods of production. Bring in non traditional methods and the old guard tremble or roll over their graves – but who cares? We’ve got to get it right.”
To find out more about Kylie Minogue’s wine range go to kylieminoguewines.com