The Cronks were a regular family from London who risked everything on a dream of owning a vineyard in Provence. Now the Clooneys are their neighbours and you’ve probably bought …
By MADDY FLETCHER FOR YOU MAGAZINE
Updated: 05:00, 18 April 2026
Stephen and Jeany Cronk are trying to be diplomatic about how they feel when people put ice in rose. 'If you like to drink it that way, you totally should,' says Jeany. 'We don't believe in telling people what to do. They should just have a nice time with wine.' So far, so tactful.
Stephen, however, is struggling. He pauses, then says, 'Ice is fine.' Would he be offended if someone had a glass of his rose and plopped a couple of cubes in? 'I would bite my tongue.
No. If people have bought a bottle of my rose, they can do what they want with it. As long as it's my rose!'
Stephen, 62, and Jeany, 53, are the founders of Mirabeau, the Provencal rose brand.
The British duo started the business in 2010, having moved to France[1] the previous year after quitting their jobs in telecoms, selling their two-up two-down in Teddington, and relocating - with their three children - to the French countryside.
Within a year, they had made 24,000 bottles and were stocked in Waitrose[2].
Now, the Cronks employ 22 people and sell their wine (normally for GBP14 a bottle) in 50 countries.
This February, they also sold a majority stake of the company to Concha Y Toro, the Chilean wine business valued at just under GBP1 billion, which owns, among other brands, Casillero del Diablo.
It's the first time the South American firm has ever bought a rose and the first time they have ever bought a wine made in Europe.
The Cronks got the idea in the late 1990s. Stephen, who had briefly worked in wine in his early 20s, and Jeany were visiting friends in Perpignan, Southwest France.
Stephen and Jeany Cronk (pictured) risked everything to launch a wine brand
They were on a walk, 'and we ended up looking at this beautiful vineyard', says Stephen. 'The guy we were with said, "This is actually on the market for the same price you've just paid for your tiny, terraced house in London[3]."'
They started thinking quite seriously. Ten years later, the Cronks stopped thinking and began doing.
They weren't about to buy an entire vineyard, but they were going to sell their house, rent in Provence, send their children to a French school, quit their jobs and put all the capital they had into starting a wine company.
It wasn't masses of money; initially, Mirabeau had no external investors and, as Stephen has said in the past, 'I wasn't this City whiz kid who'd made millions.'
Today the couple think these high stakes were necessary. 'We liquidated everything,' says Jeany. 'We wanted to force ourselves not to have too easy a way back.'
Their early months in France sound, basically, awful.
All the Cronks' money was going into the business, so, says Jeany, 'we lived off baked beans for a very long time'.
Their youngest child hated French school and cried most days for a year. And, she adds, the couple had 'next to zero knowledge and next to zero contacts'.
Stephen got a directory of all the Provencal wine estates and 'started cold calling everybody with a vineyard bigger than 40 hectares'.
Stephen and Jeany surrounded by their vines in Provence
At Home In Provence by Jeany Cronk (pictured) is published by Hardie Grant
The couple (pictured) have told Maddy Fletcher about false starts, the kindness of strangers and A-list neighbours
He would ask - 'in my then less than schoolboy French' - if they might have any surplus fruit or wine they could work with. 'They all said non.'
'At about six o'clock one weekday, I threw this directory on to my filing cabinet to head upstairs for a glass of rose. As I was leaving my office I thought, no, a good salesman would make one more phone call.'
He rang a vineyard owner who said, firstly, 'I do speak English', and, secondly, 'I'd love to help you.' The next day that friendly Frenchman introduced the Cronks to a wine grower who agreed to provide them with the grapes to make their first vintage.
A lot of wine tasting followed.
Hundreds of glasses or thousands? 'Oh,' says Jeany, 'thousands.' (According to Stephen, 'You need to learn how to spit. Otherwise you end up crashing your car into the tree outside the winery.') They asked Angela Muir, a master of wine who Stephen knew from his early drinks career, to help choose their blend.
There were fiascos. Stephen and Jeany ordered screw caps - 'because they really suit a Provence rose' - but when they arrived they were the wrong colour.
The wine then had to be put in a temporary tank while they waited for the correct caps to come.
When that happened, a month later, the Cronks discovered the temporary tank hadn't been sealed properly and 24,000 bottles worth of wine had gone bad. Stephen recalls the bottling man saying, 'This is une vraie catastrophe.'
Thankfully, that same bottling man said the wine was good enough for him to sell, personally, elsewhere.
So, he took the 24,000 bottles, instructed the Cronks to get fresh wine, and they tried again.
They bought their own vineyard in 2018
In December 2010, the Cronks sold their first batch of wine to Waitrose.
It was stocked in 60 of the supermarket's stores
'That was such a moment of kindness, to help us out of a pickle.' (Helpfulness has been a common quality among locals, says Jeany. 'And France often has quite a bad reputation for sort of, you know, friendliness.')
In December 2010, the Cronks sold their first batch of wine to Waitrose. It was stocked in 60 of the supermarket's stores. (They always planned on selling primarily in England, rather than France - coals to Newcastle etc.) 'My mum was so proud she would just stand by the shelf at her local branch in Surrey for hours, telling people to buy her son's wine,' says Stephen.
In their second year they sold 80,000 bottles and Stephen remembers watching a rugby match at 82,000-capacity stadium Twickenham, gawping at imagining that crowd as bottles of wine.
After six years, Mirabeau was making 360,000 bottles annually, and now the company produces three million bottles a year.
The Cronks broke even in 2018 and, finally, bought a vineyard. 'We'd looked at 39 properties,' says Stephen. 'Everything was either too expensive or next to a motorway or pylons.' The 40th - a 20-hectare Provence estate with good-for-growing, southwest-facing slopes - was perfect.
It was, however, pricier than a house in Teddington. The land is near Miraval (Brad Pitt's wine estate), Plan-de-la-Tour (where Johnny Depp's is), and, says Stephen, 'the Clooneys have just moved in'. (The Cronks are quiet on whether they've befriended these notable neighbours.) To buy it, they had to get external investment.
About 95 per cent of Mirabeau wine is produced in other vineyards, and the Cronks use their land to make cases of their 'estate wine', La Reserve Rose (GBP29).
The couple are obsessed with temperature, soil conditions, and Stephen has made the farm totally regenerative. But vineyard-owning is complicated.
In 2021, there were forest fires in the region. 'It took out 7,000 hectares of nature reserve around us,' says Stephen. 'We'd just finished renovating two wooden barns. Both burned down.
We lost the whole vintage of our estate wine to smoke taint. And, to put it into perspective, three people died - not on our estate but in the region. It was started by a cigarette thrown out of a car window.'
Since selling to Concha Y Toro, the Cronks have moved out of their vineyard and into a nearby family house in Provence
There are insurances, says Jeany, and among growers 'we have a system that, if somebody loses all their harvest, the neighbours will pile in and give them a bit of theirs'.
But, 'every farmer, hard as it may sound, needs to have enough money in the kitty to have a year like that'.
Since selling to Concha Y Toro, the Cronks have moved out of their vineyard and into a nearby family house in Provence. (They've also bought a home in London, as their now-grown-up children have all moved to the UK.)
They remain very involved in the company, and are still excited when they see someone buying a bottle of Mirabeau.
Recently, Stephen was in Waitrose and spotted a man 'pulling a couple of bottles' from the shelf. He went up to him, explained who he was and said thank you.
'It is the best feeling. We're just so grateful when anybody buys a bottle of our wine.' Whether they then put ice in it or not.
At Home In Provence by Jeany Cronk is published by Hardie Grant, GBP27.
To order a copy for GBP22.95 until 3 may, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
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