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Hello Emma fans! We’ve all woken up today with the news that Emma has joined the family business and teamed up with her brother in the launch of a gin, Renais! Our gallery has been updated with both the cover for How To Spend It, out today, and the photo session featuring the siblings. You can read the full article below, that gives you not just a better insight of the family business but also Emma’s career over the years, and spoiler alert: Looks like Emma is gearing up to go back to school soon (and we might be getting some more news from the acting and directing realm soon).

To call Emma Watson’s father an oenophile would be undercooking it. “He’s a mega-nerd,” says Emma over a long lunch last September, with a bias towards regional classics, at Bistrot des Grands Crus in Chablis.  “I prefer to say I’m passionate,” Chris replies, taking the measure of a glass of local red. “But I am a mega-nerd.” Chris Watson loves France, and the French. More specifically, he loves rural Burgundy, in the eastern-central part of the country, and especially Chablis, the small Burgundian town famous for its white wine.  But the Watsons are in France, en famille, to toast a new venture: the launch of a gin, the brainchild of Alex Watson, Emma’s younger brother, who until recently was an executive in the drinks industry. It’s called Renais, or “rebirth”, pronounced like “Renée”. And, uniquely for a gin, it is as much French as it is English, just as the Watsons feel themselves to be.

At least partly a tribute to Chris, and to the land – the terroir – that the Watsons love, Renais will go on sale for the first time today, initially in the UK. Flavoured by the skins of grapes handpicked in the steepest, most prestigious grand cru vineyards of Chablis, it is, in Alex’s description, “quite an esoteric product”. And, in its way, a very modern one: the grape skins are organic and the gin is certified carbon-neutral. Chris Watson, 65, is a high-flying City lawyer, a partner in a large international law firm, with a focus on communications law. He is also an accomplished linguist. As well as French, Watson speaks German, Spanish, Italian, and his Russian is good enough to decode complicated legal documents. His English is also decent. But Chris’s real passions are for game fishing, music and wine-making – and wine-drinking.

He first came to Chablis in 1987, “to pick grapes and carry a hod up and down a hill”, as he puts it, sounding very much like a man who would like nothing more than to be doing exactly that right now. Back then, he was a young English barrister recently relocated to Paris with his then wife, Jacqueline, also a lawyer. During their seven years in France, they had two children, Emma, born in 1990, and Alex, two years later. And even though the family moved back to England when Alex was a toddler, Chris and the kids kept coming back to Chablis year after year. (Chris and Jacqueline divorced in 1995, and Emma and Alex have long since acquired new siblings on both sides.) Chris bought his first vineyard in 1991. This was easier said than done. It took him eight years to satisfy the criteria of the local authorities so that he could plant his vines. Bureaucracy, I am not the first person to note, is a French word. Then again, so is entrepreneur.
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To celebrate her directorial debut with Prada’s new refillable perfume, Emma took part in a shoot for the Autumn/Winter issue of Wonderland magazine, where she graces us with not one but four covers! Our gallery has been updated with the covers and outtakes from the photo session.

The world took a turn the day George Floyd was murdered by a police officer, in the United States. No more would we accept police violence against black people. Black Lives Matter, and for white people that means educating ourselves on the black community and their history. You can do it by watching documentaries, television series, listening to podcasts, and by reading books. It’s not a secret that Emma Watson is a bookworm, having her own book club. As Emma posts on her Instagram account many ways we can help – through petitions, donations, supporting businesses owned by black people, she also shares how we can educate ourselves, become better allies and help on the fight against racism. Vogue UK has published an article, taken from Emma’s book recommendations post, with information on each of the books mentioned. You can learn about them below.

In a bid to encourage people to educate themselves about systemic racism, Emma Watson has shared her current reading list on Instagram. After acknowledging the ways in which she, as a white person, has benefited from white supremacy in an earlier statement on social media, the actor encouraged her 57 million followers to join her in picking up books by authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and David Olusoga.

“Self-education is an essential part of any anti-racist journey, and reading has always been a huge part of my personal learning,” Watson wrote, along side a painting by Natalie Lauren Sims. “In 2016, I started @oursharedshelf, a bookclub to create conversations around intersectionality, feminism and equal rights and to profile feminist writers,” she continued. “Many of the writers and books we featured over the years are relevant to anyone wanting to understand that the struggle for racial justice has been a long one, that ALL Black Lives Matter and women’s voices are a vital part of any movement for change. Alice Walker, Bell Hooks, Maya Angelou, Roxane Gay, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Angie Thomas, Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper, and Toni Morrison are just some of the authors we featured and which I urge you to check out if you haven’t already.⁣”

More recently, Watson has been working her way through multiple reads by people of colour. “I hope you’ll pick these up and read along with me,” she wrote.

Here, British Vogue takes a closer look at her educational reading list.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon⁣
Published in 1961 by psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the 20th Century. Writing about the trauma of colonisation, Fanon’s text inspired anti-colonial movements thanks to its analysis of race, violence, class and culture in a fight for freedom.

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published in 2018, ⁣Coates’s book is essential reading in understanding race in America today. We Were Eight Years in Power looks at Barack Obama’s presidency and Trump’s thereafter, by delving into the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of white supremacy.
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Emma recently had the opportunity to interview Valerie Hudson, author of “Sex and World Peace”. If you follow Emma on instagram, you’ll recognize this book as the one she highlight on International Women’s Day, on March 8. It’s also “Our Shared Shelf”, Emma’s book club that you can join as long you have a goodreads account, pick for April! Teen Vogue teamed up with Emma for this interview, that you can read below!

It probably takes a lot for Emma Watson to be starstruck, but that’s how the iconic Little Women and Harry Potter actor says she felt when she spoke to Texas A&M professor and author Valerie Hudson.

The two recently hopped on a call to discuss Hudson’s book, Sex and World Peace, which Watson received a copy of from Gloria Steinem and which she highlighted on her Instagram for International Women’s Day. They ended up having a sprawling conversation on everything from the power of being happily single to Watson’s work with the United Nations Women HeForShe campaign to why men just don’t listen to women enough.

Teen Vogue published their conversation, below.

Emma Watson: This is so cool. I’m starstruck!

Valerie Hudson: I sort of feel the same way. One of my daughters is currently reading the Harry Potter series, so every time she finishes a book, we get to see the movie, and of course, you know, you are their heroine.

EW: Ah, I love that. You are such a badass. Your book, it exploded my brain — I think that’s the most accurate way that I can put it! What prompted you to write it?

VH: When I went to graduate school in international affairs, you could have taken my entire coursework and never known there were women on Earth. It was that woman-less.… The idea that national security could have something to do with women would have seemed ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. And I was a product of that. And it really wasn’t until my eyes began to open, I began to ask questions. I began to read things that had hints.

One of the things you discover very quickly is that if you say, ‘I think national security has something to do with women’, people say, ‘Oh, you know, come back when you’ve got some data; don’t tell us these stories.’ It’s too dismissible without data. That’s why we took the data route.
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