About
Isabelle Legeron MW

Why ‘TCFW’?

A South African winemaker we featured in one of our shows recently told me that he gets stopped in the street by people saying, “oh, I know you, you’re on that show with that crazy French woman”.

I had been looking for an easy name to remember – people can’t pronounce my last name and can never spell Isabelle properly – but I was stumped. Stumped that is until I told my genius friend Michael the story of the winemaker and he said ‘well, there you have it, you are THAT CRAZY FRENCH WOMAN’! It took me a little while to love it too but it is such a brilliant name and so slowly but surely I became THAT CRAZY FRENCH WOMAN.

Our Stand

THAT CRAZY FRENCH WOMAN isn’t about being crazy mad but rather about being outside the box and promoting wines that are non-conventional, that are about authenticity of taste. Wines that really are natural, unlike the plethora of marketing spiel we get fed on a daily basis. No additives, no forcefully made wines, shoehorned into fitting fashionable tastes and flavours. Us wine professionals have become experts at describing flavours stemming from added yeasts & oak chips; texture stemming from gum arabic, powdered tannins & micro-oxygenation; flavour intensity stemming from reverse osmosis; describing colours made more intense thanks to Mega blue or brighter thanks to charcoal filtration etc. You get the picture. On this website less is more. I want to promote farmers who, despite all the setbacks and the glowing dollar signs on the other side, take risks and pour their heart and soul into making wines without any additives and who farm their land in a sustainable way.

Revolution

We need a rethink. We are becoming further and further removed from the authentic taste of nature.

We shy away from strong flavours. We have lost the know-how of collecting wild herbs and mushrooms. When was the last time you picked up a piece of fruit and really thought about what it smelt like? Or stuck your nose in a fennel bush and really registered its fresh, heady aniseed aromas?

We are lost in the bland world of tasteless, cellophaned food. I know this is changing as witnessed by the rise of farmers markets and organisations like Slow Food. And it’s in no small part thanks to celeb chefs who have made us think. If you talk to this nation’s top cooking talent, you’ll find they spend hours sourcing the best ingredients. A small Michelin starred restaurant might have up to 90 different suppliers and 25 people in the kitchen just to make sure they give you an extra-ordinary taste experience. Then they’ll pour shit wine to accompany your dish.

The revolution has started in food; the same needs to happen in wine. We need to think about the wine we drink, start asking questions, demand clarity. I know it sounds clichéd but lets drink less but drink better. Let’s drink real wine.

I am out to convert every wine drinker out there. A tall order and probably unrealistic but I’m damn sure going to give it a go.

Wines I Like

What to expect from wines I pick…

I prefer fresh and elegant wines to big and bold. I am not a big fan of oak, it really needs to be well integrated and in the background. Most of the wines I drink aren’t particularly alcoholic but when they are, if the alcohol level tops 14 or more, I will make sure the wine is in balance. If it isn’t, I won’t feature the wine on this site. I am a demanding taster so if the wine falls short I will say it like it is.

Most importantly, every wine I feature, without exception, is a wine I drink and a wine I want in my cellar. So you can trust that if it’s here, it’s worth a shot.

And every wine I feature on this site is a natural wine or is at least trying to head that way in that they value and respect a truly sustainable philosophy. They will be at the very minimum organic or biodynamic in the vineyard. These wines, if not natural because they aren’t low intervention in the cellar, will be clearly labelled as such.

About Me

I am French, I taste for a living, and I recently rediscovered wine.

After years learning about wine, working in wine and tasting bucket loads of the stuff – from the cheap and cheerful to bottles worth a building in some parts of the world – I seem to have come full circle. All I want is real, delicious, natural wine.

I do lots of stuff outside wine but my favourite thing is mushrooming (although I’m also quite fond of looking for stuff: old bottles, fossils, gold hunting, wild food…). I love the outside and I love finding treasure. So in a way natural wine is easy for me to understand because I am so used to harvesting proper, wild bounty, complete with all its imperfections and irregularities. It’s nature’s perfect way of adding personality, individuality and adventure to life, and consequently, to food and drink too. Every year I spend days watching the sun / rain / heat so I can be the first into the forest for mushrooms. No two years are ever the same, so it’s always exciting. Nature isn’t predictable, it’s not controlled, and it’s definitely not boring. I love it.

There is also a more serious side to that crazy French woman. I am the first French woman Master of Wine and I sometimes wear suits, especially when I visit my corporate clients with Wine Lab. The rest of the time I live in jeans, t-shirts and trainers.

I recently redid the wine list at Hibiscus, Claude’s 2-star Michelin Restaurant in Mayfair (London). The list is now all about showcasing delicious natural wine – a first for a Michelin starred restaurant in London.

Journey into Wine

I am a country-bumpkin.

When I was little I’d spend my days picking walnuts, making jams, driving the tractor and helping out with the vines but it wasn’t until 2000, after a good teenage strop and an i-don’t-want-to-be-like-mum-and-dad, that I realised that my heart lay in its roots. My brother’s a vigneron (French for ‘grape growing winemaker’); my folks were vignerons; both grannies and granddads were vignerons; and all my great-grandparents were too (except one who spent his life blending Cognac)… Basically, we’ve all always been nuts about grapes. And, being from Cognac, a lot of what is harvested makes its way into the pot-still.

I started in the vineyard when I was only a few months old – my mum would put me in a basket at the end of one of the rows while she tended the vines and would run back every so often to check I was OK. By the time I was 6, I’d graduated to packhorse, spending days dragging bits of dead vine back to the farmhouse to cook Sunday lunch.

As seasons past and I grew up, I started to work the vintages: harvesting, stomping grapes for our homemade brew or gasping for breath between brotherly dunks into a vat of fermenting juice. Then, at the beginning of summer, when all the other kids were out buying ice-lollies and going to the fun fair, I was back in the vineyard hitching the vines up so they’d stand straight and tall.

At eighteen I swore blindly that no way in hell was I ever going to work vineyards again so off I went. Clearly didn’t last long.

My Dad

Meet Pierre Legeron – or Pierrot, as he was more commonly known. He was a hard-working grape farmer, who played so much football at the weekend they decided to name the village stadium after him. He was a regular kind of guy and a totally brilliant dad. He taught me to drive the tractor, how to care for our fruit trees that he treasured, and to collect wild food all over the French countryside. He never went anywhere without his pocketknife in case he stumbled across wild oysters or mussels ripe for harvesting, and his days of planting were inevitably followed by trips to the seaside with my brother and I to fish for crabs, razorclams and shrimp.

One of my fondest memories is seeing him scurrying off into the early morning mist to catch us a hare or a pheasant for supper; his shotgun in hand, his pointers and griffons galloping behind.

He was a born farmer. He loved planting and growing and spent years tending the orchard, the vines and his garden where he planted Table grapes of all colours, shapes and sizes.

He loved the great outdoors. He was young and fit and healthy. And he died of lung cancer, aged 60.

He’d never smoked.

His lungs were so riddled with tumours that he died within 3 months of diagnosis. Turns out it may have been a direct result of the chemicals he so painstakingly sprayed in the vineyard.

As I read and searched and found out more and more about proper, natural wine, it dawned on me that his death was not only avoidable but futile.

He was a victim of marketing spiel and had fallen for the ‘know-how’ of large chemical retailers who, understandably from their point of view, had shareholders, profits and the bottom line as their primary concern.

In the end, his herbicides, fungicides and pesticides not only meant that his beloved vines became dependent rather than self-sufficient but, with the birth of systemics, the sprays may actually have made their way through the core of his plants and into the wines themselves. For someone who so loved the wilderness and its natural bounty, I think he’d turn in his grave if he could see what we see now.

My Family