Isabelle Legeron

Isabelle Legeron, the Travel Channel’s very own wine-wonderwoman, continues her quest to find “free-range” wine by travelling to the world’s best wineries to meet the passionate and talented winemakers who are putting themselves and where they live, into the bottle.  This time she is in Australia, a country that has taken the wine world by storm. Isabelle charts its meteoric rise whilst dipping into Australia’s unique landscapes, culture and people. She sips and spits with a Who’s Who of Aussie winemaking and leaves you knowing how to simply enjoy wine without all the fuss and nonsense. From the delicate Pinots of Melbourne and the Yarra Valley she travels inland to gold country where the reds are as big as they come. Then to the Barossa Valley in South Australia, Australian wine’s spiritual home and finally to Adelaide and Kangeroo Island; she takes in steam trains, balloons, Aussie films, wildlife, prospecting, food, music, classic cars and enough great wine to grace any Frenchwoman’s cellar.   In this episode, Isabelle touches down in Melbourne, the lifestyle capital of Australia. She takes to the road for some wine and food matching in a BYO, explores the area’s offering of pinot noirs and meets some of the biggest cheeses in the wine world down under. She cooks up a barbie with a fine catch of a winemaker, gets behind the ‘wheel’ of Australia’s oldest steam train and learns what it is that is just so unique about the Australian spirit that meant the country’s wine was catapulted to centre stage in less than a quarter century!   Isabelle goes bush, abandons Melbourne and heads inland to Victoria’s dry dusty interior. On her way she learns to throw a boomerang with an Aboriginal Elder, unearths indigenous delights when she meets one of Australia’s most famous filmmakers, and pays a visit to a winemaker called Duck busy building a Japanese Buddhist temple. She tastes her way through the difference in climate of this outback hinterland where the sun bakes the earth and finds out just how much the Victorian wine industry owes to gold.   This episode sees Isabelle journeying to the spiritual home of Australia’s signature grape variety – Shiraz. Settled by German refugees in the 1800s, Isabelle discovers a heritage that is still very much alive today: wursts of every shape and size, names like Fritz and Franz aplenty and, funnily enough, some of Australia’s best Riesling! She pays a visit to the home of Russell Crowe’s favourite vino, tries a tipple that is over one hundred years old and, in the light of this rich history, learns just how important the issue of water and sustainable agriculture is to the Australia of today and tomorrow.   Isabelle ends the series in the capital of South Australia, aka Australia’s Wine State, where she touches the pulse of the Australian wine world and meets the Wizards of Oz – founding fathers of modern Australian winemaking. In this episode Isabelle discovers the importance that the medical profession has had on Australia’s wine heritage, meets a wacky winemaking visionary and travels to one of Australia’s most remote and savagely beautiful islands, where grapes rub shoulders with colonies of sea lions, wallabies, and the real Aussie outdoors. .