A surprising number of well-known names have quietly put down roots in the Var. Is it really just for the wine?
Who are we kidding, there are so many good reasons to choose the Var as a second home, the privacy, the working vineyards rather than manicured estates built purely for show, a pace of life that doesn't come with an audience. The wine is really just the icing on the cake.
It's worth asking why here specifically, rather than the Luberon or the Alpilles, where a lot of the more famous Provence real estate stories tend to play out. The Var offers something those areas mostly don't anymore: genuine privacy, working vineyards rather than manicured estates built purely for show, and a slower pace that doesn't come with quite the same audience. For anyone with the means to buy discretion outright, that trade seems to matter.
George and Amal Clooney bought the 172-hectare Domaine du Canadel, in Brignoles, in May 2021. When they arrived, Brignoles' mayor personally welcomed them, a small-town touch that says something about how these purchases tend to land locally rather than as a celebrity spectacle. The estate's 18th-century main residence sits alongside a tennis court, a private lake, and olive groves, and at the center of it, a working ten-hectare vineyard. The couple debuted their own estate wine in 2024, three years after buying the place, patient by celebrity-purchase standards, and a sign they were building something rather than just attaching a name to a label.
George Lucas's Skywalker Vineyards expanded into the Var in 2017 with Château Margüi, in Châteauvert, joining his main estate in California's Marin County and a sibling property, Il Convento, in Umbria. Margüi covers 287 acres, 42 of them vines, and the whole property is certified organic. The land itself has been farmed since Roman times, which makes a 2017 celebrity purchase a small, recent chapter in a much longer story, one that started long before anyone here had heard the word Skywalker.
Château Miraval, between Correns and Le Val, is probably the most famous Var estate of all, and its fame predates any celebrity involvement. Its rosé built a serious reputation long before 2008, when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie bought the property and began working with the Perrin family, of the Rhône's Château de Beaucastel, on the winemaking itself. Under that partnership, Miraval's rosé became one of the most recognized in Provence internationally, sold well beyond wine shops into the kind of restaurants and hotels that stock exactly one rosé and want it to be a conversation piece. Ownership has been the subject of an active, ongoing legal dispute since Jolie sold her share in 2021.
A few more names come up locally, even without a vineyard attached. Johnny Depp has owned a private estate just outside Plan-de-la-Tour, a quiet village not far from Saint-Tropez, since the mid-2000s, and still does. Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't own here, but he's a familiar summer sight offshore, vacationing by yacht along the Saint-Tropez coast most years. And Chanel, not a person but worth the mention anyway, bought the Domaine de l'Île on Porquerolles in 2019 and has since become the island's largest wine producer, proof the Var's pull isn't limited to individual celebrities.
None of them are why the Var is worth visiting. But it says something that, given a choice of anywhere in the world, they picked here too, and mostly for the same reasons anyone else does, the quiet, the land, and a glass of something local at the end of the day.