Brad Pitt has won a major round in his long‑running legal fight with ex‑wife Angelina Jolie over their French wine estate, after a California appeals court ruled that Russian‑born vodka billionaire Yuri Shefler must face questions in a US courtroom about his role in the disputed Château Miraval deal.
For context, the legal battle dates back to Jolie’s decision to sell her 50 per cent stake in Château Miraval, the former couple’s sprawling Provencal estate and rosé empire now valued at around $164 million, to Shefler’s Stoli Group. The sale, completed after a California judge cleared Jolie to dispose of her interest in 2021, blindsided Brad Pitt, who says he had been negotiating to buy her out and believed he held a first right of refusal over any future sale.
Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie And The ‘Spiteful’ Miraval Sale
Pitt sued after learning that Jolie had sold her share to Stoli, accusing her of acting out of spite and breaching alleged agreements they had made about the future of the winery. According to an insider cited in court filings, Jolie ‘knew Brad didn’t want to sell her share of Miraval to Shefler, and she had agreed with Brad that he would have first right of refusal. So selling to Shefler behind Brad’s back was spiteful.’
The same source framed the move as ‘payback after the custody dispute’, a reference to the bitter, years‑long battle over the former couple’s six children following their split in 2016. That emotional backdrop has hung over the business fight ever since, turning what might have been a standard commercial dispute into something far messier.
Pitt’s legal strategy has been to try to unravel the Stoli deal itself, arguing that Jolie had no right to dispose of her Miraval interest without his consent. In February 2022, the Seven actor launched coordinated lawsuits in California and France, targeting both Jolie and entities linked to Shefler. The aim is simple, if ambitious, to claw back control of the estate he has poured time, money and, frankly, a fair bit of personal branding into.
Shefler’s side has pushed back hard. The billionaire, who heads the Stoli Group and made his fortune in Russian vodka, has maintained that he played no significant personal role in the $64 million purchase of Jolie’s stake, and that the transaction was handled by his European representatives for what is, ultimately, a French vineyard.
A lower court bought that argument. Because the negotiations involved European intermediaries and a property in France, a California judge initially ruled that state courts did not have jurisdiction over Shefler personally. For Brad Pitt, this was a serious problem. Without the ability to question the Stoli boss directly, big chunks of the deal would remain conveniently opaque.
Appeals Court Says Brad Pitt Can Haul Shefler Into California
The California Court of Appeal has now flipped that script. In a unanimous ruling on 24 June, the court concluded that Shefler had, in fact, ‘purposefully availed himself’ of California’s jurisdiction and could therefore be compelled to sit for deposition and participate in state proceedings.
The judges were notably sceptical about his claimed distance from the transaction. ‘It defies credulity that Shefler, a sophisticated businessman, would risk almost $40 million on a transaction about which he knew nothing and with which he had no involvement,’ the ruling stated, referring to evidence that he personally guaranteed $39 million of his own money to fund Jolie’s instalment payments.
That personal guarantee, in the court’s view, cuts through the idea that this was just another corporate deal handled somewhere in Europe. If you are promising almost $40 million of your own cash, the judges effectively said, it is hard to argue you were just a passive bystander.
The ruling also pointed to direct correspondence between Shefler and Jolie. In one message cited in the case, Shefler assured the actress that ‘Miraval is safe with me’ and thanked her for her ‘trust in me and my company’. He went on to describe the sale as a ‘unique transaction, and in certain respects, it is not as straightforward as we would all like it to be’.
He also thanked her for her ‘willingness to assist in resolving potential issues with the remaining shareholders of the company’, a thinly veiled reference, lawyers argue, to Pitt. That line, with its polite corporate phrasing, is exactly the sort of stuff judges love to see when they are deciding whether someone is really hands‑off.
For Pitt’s camp, the appeals decision is a significant tactical win. It opens the door to detailed questioning of Shefler on what he knew, when he knew it and how deeply he was involved in structuring the Miraval deal. An insider close to the case said the billionaire will now ‘have to divulge what really happened behind the scenes and how the deal was orchestrated’.
Brad Pitt’s Winery War Still Marching Towards Trial
None of this means Brad Pitt has won the war. The Miraval saga has already seen both sides take hits in court and there are years still to run.
In 2024, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge rejected three separate attempts by Jolie to have Pitt’s claims thrown out, keeping the core of his lawsuit alive. That ruling cleared the path for the dispute over the now estimated $164 million operation to proceed towards a full trial.
Pitt has not had everything his own way though. In May, he suffered a setback when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled he could not force Jolie to hand over a batch of private emails related to the winery dispute. The court found that he had ‘not met the burden’ required to pierce her attorney‑client privilege, underlining that even Hollywood’s most high‑profile litigants run into the same legal walls as everyone else.
As things stand, the Miraval case is listed for trial on 1 February 2027 in Los Angeles County, with a court‑ordered mediation session scheduled for October this year. The dates underline how grindingly slow complex civil litigation can be, even when Brad Pitt is in the caption.
Neither Pitt nor Jolie has publicly commented on the latest jurisdiction ruling, and Stoli has not issued a new statement in response to the appeals court’s findings. IBTimes UK cannot independently verify the claims of ‘spite’ and ‘payback’ attributed to unnamed insiders, so readers should take those characterisations lightly and focus on what is locked into the court record, the money, the emails and now the requirement that a very private billionaire answer questions under oath.
What happens in that deposition could shape everything that follows, or, just as likely, push the parties a step closer to an off‑stage settlement. For once, the drama here genuinely is in the fine print.
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