France

Leila Killoran-Tehrani

In 1987, aged only three, Leila Killoran was forced to flee Iran with her family. Her mother’s British passport was the ticket out, and what followed was a childhood squeezed into a small council house in Manchester with her mother, grandmother and brother. Growing up mixed-race was a status which isolated her from her peers and ultimately resulted in her changing her surname from Ahmadzadeh-Tehrani to Killoran in order to escape the incessant bullying, especially in the wake of 9/11 when it grew so relentless she simply couldn’t ignore it anymore.

As an adult, Leila’s path has not been straight forward either. She had just been accepted onto the Master of Wine programme in 2019 – the first step towards reaching her MW North Star – when the pandemic hit and she was made redundant overnight. This meant she had to withdraw from the MW programme in order to stay afloat. She enrolled instead at Plumpton College and earned a Postgraduate Diploma in Viticulture and Oenology, and some time later, invested in a vineyard near Limoux with her mother, despite neither of them speaking a word of French. However, agriculture is brutal, and Leila has since had to sell her vineyard due to significant drops in grape prices making it unsustainable.

Leila is now ready to return to the Master of Wine programme, stronger than ever and with even more experience in her back pocket to draw on.