Grape expectations: how Sting has made millions (without music)

Here’s a thought to make you want to suffocate on the spot: with every breath you take, Sting earns $2,000 a day. Oh, sorry, sorry – I seem to have misread. Thanks to Every Breath You Take, the Police’s Grammy-winning, creepy 1983 hit single, Sting is said to earn $2,000 a day.

The royalties from that one song – or two, really, because he successfully sued Puff Daddy for using the sample without permission on the latter’s 1997 tribute to the Notorious B.I.G., I’ll be Missing You, so gets all the royalties from that, too – have helped make the lute-wielding, tantric sex-having former Police frontman one of the wealthiest musicians in the world.

The most recent Sunday Times Rich List has Sting’s net worth at £220 million. That figure puts him well ahead of Sir Rod Stewart, Brian May, Eric Clapton and Robbie Williams, but behind half the Beatles, half the Rolling Stones, Elton John, U2 and Lord Lloyd-Webber. Not that he cares, of course.

“For one thing, it is nobody’s business what I earn... For another, if you are on this list and you see Phil Collins is worth £5 million more, it makes you so f------ competitive,” he once said. For what it’s worth, Collins has £145 million, as I expect Sting well knows.

But how can the man born Gordon Sumner be quite so rich, and what could he be spending it on? Those extra-small hemp T-shirts he’s worn for the better part of 20 years can’t be so dear, can they? Is his candle, harness and yoga mat budget that weighty? Did the collaboration album with Shaggy sell more boombastically, fantastically than we all realised?

One clue came this week, in the form of a celebrity news story so pleasingly bizarre that it harked back to a pre-pandemic era of A-list what-on-earthery. In short: Sting told a magazine that in 1999 he and his wife, the film producer Trudie Styler, were duped into buying their 850-acre Tuscan vineyard, Il Palagio, by the owner at the time, a naughty duke called Simone Vincenzo Velluti Zati di San Clemente, who gave them a glass of delicious barolo, passing it off as a chianti of the estate.

“Cor,” Sting might have said, “there’s a message in this bottle, and it’s saying, ‘de do do do buy this vineyard!’, it’s saying, ‘Roxanne, get on this red wine!’, it’s saying, ‘I’m an Englishman in…’”

He was impressed, basically, and said it was the wine that clinched the deal. He later discovered he’d been fooled, but did he lose his temper? Of course not, this is Sting, a man of such equilibrium that he can listen to Fields of Gold emanating from his own mouth several hundred times a year and still not go insane.

No, he became only more determined to make the vineyard a success. Hiring the American biodynamic winemaking and viticulture consultant Alan York, he replanted the vineyards for two years. The estate now produces a range of wines, many named after Sting songs – along with olive oil and honey. And he is personally involved. Photographs of him and Trudie holding secateurs near the vines exist, for one, as does Sting’s admission that he serenades them. “I sing in the cellar,” he said. “I like to think the wine’s taken it in.”

In 2016, one of his reds, Sister Moon, was named one of the 100 best wines in Italy. Four years later, his Bianco Toscana, named Roxanne, had him tie with Dave Matthews in a contest of the best celebrity wines. (Cameron Diaz’s white blend came fifth; Phillip Schofield’s boxed wine was not entered.)

A happy ending, then? Oh gosh no. This week, the naughty duke’s son, Simone San Clemente Jr, hit back with the wild fury of an aristocrat whose decanter had been defamed, and with the implausible vocabulary of Google Translate.

“The slander: poisonous and completely false,” he told a local Italian newspaper. “Nothing could be more alien to the character, habits, behaviour, in a word, from the spirit of my father, to behave like a swindling host.”

Then he hit Sting where it hurts: in his throbbing spiritual core. “I wish for Sting that the karma so dear to him does not turn against him and I invite him to reflect on the truth of the facts in the course of his meditations.”

We await the results from Sting’s internal study, and can in the meantime browse Il Palagio’s Instagram to see what he and Trudie have been up to in lockdown. Nudity and sexual content is banned on that particular platform, but Sting, a man so carnal he’s even aged 69, still manages to infuse wine adverts with suggestion.

There’s Trudie and the couple’s business partner, the oenologist Riccardo Cotarella, sitting at a table tasting their wares while Sting sits on a wall behind, preferring to watch and play with his little guitar.

There’s Trudie again, just trying to relax, while Sting sits unnecessarily close to her and thrusts his little guitar again. She throws her head back in pleasure. There they both are, for some reason fully clothed and kissing in a lake. Does it make me want to visit the new pizzeria they have opened on site, which includes “local Tuscan craft beer”? Honestly, a bit.

The overall sense is that Sting could do with recording an album and maybe getting something out of his system. Fortunately he is now doing that. The Bridge, his 15th solo album, will be out in November, after one of two planned residencies in Las Vegas.

That ought to do his rich list ranking no harm whatsoever. As well as their vineyard, he and Trudie also own a 16th-century manor in Wiltshire, plus property in Malibu and the Lake District. They sold their Central Park apartment in New York for £37 million, a £17 million profit, and their Westminster home for £19 million, an £11.3 million profit.

All that’s outside his royalties from the Police’s hit-and-miss-but-mostly-hit back catalogue, which Sting is said to share with his former band members only as much as he is legally required to. But he has paid them back: the last time he got the Police together for a reunion tour, in 2008, two million tickets sold in two days, and receipts were estimated at more than £250 million.

“We made a s---load of money,” he said of that tour. “The timing was perfect and I take full credit for that. It was an exercise in nostalgia. We were realising an asset, for probably the last time.”

All this is to say that Sting can afford to be hoodwinked into buying an 850-acre vineyard. When he was a child in Northumberland in the Sixties, the Queen Mother came to his street to launch a ship. Waving a union flag, little Sting locked eyes with her as her Rolls-Royce drove by.

“That was when I got infected,” he said. “That was when I thought: ‘I don’t want this life: I want that one. Once I’d found a guitar to play I found a friend to help me get there.”

He’s not quite the Queen Mother, but he definitely got there.