When you try to explain why Kylie Minogue is such an appealing person and pop star, it sounds like you’re talking about your preferred upper. She’s fun and bright—luminous even. She’ll make you giggle and cry and dance. Want to have a nice time? Go with Kylie! 

Minogue brought that energy with her last Monday night in June at Café Carlyle in New York, where she stripped back her dance anthems like “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” “Love at First Sight,” and “Say Something” from her last album, Disco. She added in three backup singers and a pianist, and pulled off a cabaret set. There in a black, strapless Alexandre Vauthier dress, she vamped against the piano and told jokes. “We only have a handful of songs for you tonight because we know you’re very busy people,” she said. “So I invite you to join in, get comfortable. It’ll be over in a flash. And then I’ll be crying.” 

Nailing a big performance in an intimate space is difficult for even the most seasoned pro, but for Minogue it was light work—her vocals, famously high and clear, cut through the hushed dark room like a light beam. It’s all the more surprising considering that the same week she was in New Jersey at the MetLife Stadium, making a cameo on the stage with Coldplay, her old mates from her home away from home, Great Britain.

“Pretty much summed up my life right now—the extremes, the unexpected,” she told me, back couchside in Carlyle suite on Tuesday. 

In 2020, the pop star became the first woman in the U.K. to have a number one album for five straight decades. This is wild to think about. As any mathematician readers may have already noticed, at 54, she’s barely been on the earth for more than five decades. Disco, released amid COVID, is the latest, and it’s pure Kylie. Going disco isn’t a total rebrand for her (she’s been there before), but it’s a return from the album that preceded it, Golden, an articulate go at today’s Nashville. 

“I haven’t had the touring experience with albums, and it’s just really odd not to have. It will happen. It might not be the Disco tour. It might be with the next album, but there’s a whole bit missing. So when I hear that it touched someone I’m like, oh, thank you, God,” she said, and for all those who discovered her disco dancing around their apartments alone, she added, “In years to come, maybe I’ll collate more of people’s experience and understand how it happened. Like we all had such personal and profound experiences in lockdown. To be part of people’s better memories of that time was really very moving.”   

One thing about Minogue is that she’s done indie, she’s done rock, she’s done synth pop, she’s done so much, but she doesn’t lose herself in reinvention like some stars do. She’s still recognizably Kylie every time. Expansive, containing multitudes, and also essentially her. The throughline is frothy joy (even if you’re crying on the dance floor), shortcut to lose one’s inhibition and oneself, unpretentious. 

These are all—coincidentally or not—great ways to describe her wine label, Kylie Minogue Wines. (I can only speak to the prosecco rosé and the Cotés de Provence rosé, but the line also offers sauvignon blanc, brut reserva cava, merlot, and many more.) The intimate performance at the Carlyle was in honor of the release of the range in the U.S. So, yes, the queen of up has invested heavily in a depressant. Don’t worry though. As you’d expect, it’s all very light in Minogue’s hands.

There’s nothing new, and possibly nothing critically useful left to say, about a celebrity finding success in a side-hustle. It’s a smart thing to do in a world where opportunities for making money off one’s music itself grow more limited every day (especially considering how a global pandemic you may have heard of curtailed tours, a previous last-bastion income-generator for acts and all those who rely on them for jobs). Celebrities have fragrances, makeup and skincare lines, clothing lines, and many, many have wine or spirits brands. It’s more notable, then, that in the year 2022, the performer and her big pink bottle of booze scalloped in hearts is a cut above the bunch. 

Minogue’s signature rosé is the lead seller in its category, and the prosecco rosé captures a sixth of the U.K.’s entire market share. The label has sold over 5 million bottles in the two years it’s existed, and that’s without the help of the U.S. so far. (For comparison, in 2016, nine years after it launched, Whispering Angel rosé produced 3.2 million bottles. The brand was also a touchstone for Minogue when she and her partner, Benchmark Drinks, began to talk about what sort of wine they wanted to put out.) She’s the George Clooney of bubbly. She’s Miraval without the messy stuff. 

The question now is will the label be as much of a hit in the U.S. as it is in the U.K., where Minogue was based for a very long time and where she still has an enormous following. Minogue reportedly mentioned in the 2000s that she wasn’t going to attempt to conquer the U.S. anymore with her music. It’s an offhand comment made over a decade ago that’s best understood in a relative framework. She’s been a major success Stateside with the hit “The Loco-Motion” in ’88. Fever was a platinum album here, but it’s true she’s less of a household name than in other parts of the world. That being said, Americans are almost as good at drinking as our U.K. counterparts, and if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that a light, inexpensive prosecco rosé in a fun bottle is a nice thing to have on hand in the summertime. 

Minogue is a drink responsibly type, though not in a scolding way. Alcohol just isn’t a big thing for her. She likes to have her own brand before dinner or to “wind down.” She also likes to get other people buzzed, to the point where she thinks she better start traveling with it.  

“I just meet people and it’ll come up in conversation or they’ll be having a rosé and I say, ‘You should try my rosé, I’ll send you some,’ and that can be a logistical nightmare for those who have to execute it.”

When I suggest that sounds like a great way to make friends, she said, “Well, that’s part of the charm of wine is that it’s about communication and moments and experiencing memories,” Minogue said. 

It’s doubly impressive that the label has shot up the (wine) charts because there wasn’t a huge tour or campaign for its launch. “Through necessity, we had to have a soft launch. It was through COVID, so the wine’s been doing its own work,” she said. 

And now, three years into the pandemic, Minogue can do some proselytizing for the U.S. launch of the wines, but it’s not without the uncertainty, and with that uncertainty, a little kismet. The fact that she’s here in June right in time for our country’s Pride, for example, was a happy coincidence. She was supposed to fly to New York earlier in the spring but came down with COVID and had to postpone her trip. So thanks COVID? And happy Pride. 

“It would’ve been in ‘89 or ‘90,” she said of when she realized she had a growing LGBTQ+ following. She was in Sydney for reasons now a mystery to her, and someone mentioned a “Kylie Night” at the Albury Hotel, which was the most well-known gay bar on Oxford Street at the time. 

“I was like, I’ve never heard of a Kylie Night,” Minogue said. “I was like 20 or 21 years old, and so I was like, We should go!… I heard that people were dressed as me. Drags were dressed as me. That was the moment.”

They didn’t end up going because, if she remembers correctly, her manager at the time thought it might be a security issue. But she’s made it to many a Kylie Night since. 

Did she learn anything about being Kylie at those subsequent Kylie Nights? 

“I think just more,” she said, touching her face.  

Maybe we can all take the lesson to heart, this and every month. Be more Kylie. Be light and fun and unserious and sharp and savvy. Be open, but not necessarily messy. Dance all night. Dance to Disco even. Be loose, willing to experiment, but stay tethered to what makes you, you. Drink Kylie Minogue.