LITTLE ROCK — Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt will release the first wine with their names on the label next month. It’s a new rose from their 1,000-acre estate, Chateau Miraval, in Correns, France. The A-list Hollywood couple began leasing the Provence property in 2008 and now own it. The wine is part of their joint venture with the Famille Perrin, which owns Chateau Beaucastel, in the Chateauneuf-du-Pape region of the southern Rhone Valley. “We are intimately involved and quite enthused over the wine project with our friends the Perrin family,” Pitt said Wednesday through his publicist and manager, Cynthia Pett. The rose, formerly named “Pink Floyd,” will now be known simply as Miraval. A white is planned for the end of the summer and reds next year. The Perrin family began producing Miraval’s wines with the 2012 harvest and will handle distribution. The agreement with Pitt and Jolie provides equal sharing of the profits, according to winemaker Marc Perrin. “If you knew Brad and Angelina, you would see they are in search of perfection in everything,” Perrin said in a telephone interview. Pitt and Jolie attended the rose blending sessions and helped to create a distinctive new bottle shape and black label. The label will carry the names “Jolie-Pitt and Perrin.” Perrin, Jolie and Pitt were in full agreement on style, he said. Mutual friends brought the two families together. In June of 2012, Jolie and Pitt invited the Perrins to the estate to discuss working together. According to Perrin, they bonded over bottles that showed off his family’s winemaking style.

Millions of people have watched Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey. But she’s not one of them. The 78-year-old actress, who portrays Lady Grantham in the popular PBS series, told 60 Minutes that she hasn’t watched the drama because doing so would only make her agonize over her performance. She said she may watch it someday. Smith told Steve Kroft, in an interview to be televised Sunday, that what she takes from the role is “the delight of acting.” She has two Oscars, three Emmys and a Tony Award but said the Downton Abbey role has given her more public recognition than anything in her career.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/15/2013