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A Tribute to Víctor de la Serna

Víctor de la Serna, gastronome, journalist and author, to me the most knowledgeable food and wine writer from Spain, died in Madrid last Friday, the 18th of October 2024, at the age of 77.

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Víctor de la Serna (Photo courtesy of Estanis Núñez)

He comes from a family of writers, intellectuals and gastronomes: he was the great grandson of Concha Espina, one of the earlier female writers in Spain, and son of Víctor de la Serna Gutiérrez-Répide, a journalist and diplomat who often wrote about gastronomy under the name Punto y Coma. He was all these things and more. He grew up in Geneva and went to university in the US; one of the achievements he was most proud of was having been the first graduate in journalism from Spain at the University of Columbia. He spoke four or five languages like a native and was at ease writing or discussing about many subjects, on television, radio or online.

He worked at some of the most important newspapers in Spain, Informaciones from 1968, including a stint as US correspondent during the Watergate times, at El País in 1986 and Diario 16 in 1988. His areas of expertise were mainly international relations and politics, basketball, food and wine. He wrote about basketball under the name Vicente Salaner, which is an anagram of his real name. Many basketball fans were not aware of the fact that both names were the same person. And there was a third one. More on that later.

In 1989, he co-founded El Mundo, where he worked until he retired and beyond, as the stroke that ended his life happened at the newspaper offices in Madrid. In late 1999, the internet was exploding, and the newspaper decided to create some “portals,” as they were called at the time.

He was an early adopter of technology and was well-known online by the mid-1990s. Around that time, I met him at the Wine Lover’s Discussion Group, a wine bulletin board from a US wine enthusiast called Robin Garr. We created a group of friends informally called “the WLDG Spanish contingent.” That group was the basis for Víctor to create elmundovino.com, the internet wine portal from El Mundo. That’s where we cut our teeth at blind tasting and writing, as we tasted 30 wines blind every week, and we published five articles per week, Monday through Friday. I did that for 13 years, and the others continued until around the time when COVID-19 hit. It remains the best repository out there of wine articles in the Spanish language.

At the turn of the century, he planted a Syrah vineyard in a plot of land that belonged to his wife Carmen, whose surname is Sandoval. Finca Sandoval was born, the leading winery in the Manchuela appellation.

He was 40 years ahead of us. He explained how at the age of 13 he visited Romanée Conti with his father. That must have been around 1960, as he was born in 1947. His father was close friends of great chefs like Fernand Point and the Troisgros brothers. So, Víctor adopted the Spanish version of Point’s first name to write about gastronomy, Fernando Point, his third alter ego. He knew all the great wines and restaurants, dishes and products from all over the world.

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Looking at the La Beaugravière wine list, one of the greatest restaurants in southern France

As a true wine lover, he was super generous, not only with his time and erudition but also with the wines in his cellar. He was lucky to get many of the great wines from the world before they reached astronomical prices, and he shared them in our informal gatherings in Madrid, events we used to call “offlines,” real-life celebrations, as a contrast with the online discussions in the wine bulletin boards.

That’s how I jumped from drinking 1,000-peseta Gran Reserva Rioja to 1991 Chave Hermitage, 1991 La Chapelle Hermitage or 1996 Sine Qua Non Against the Wall when we met in person for the first time at Madrid’s Viridiana Restaurant. Viridiana was our headquarters for wine dinners in those early years of the elmundovino.com & friends’ get-togethers. Viridiana’s chef Abraham García, now sadly retired, was one of his best friends, and Victor was one of the first customers to visit him after he opened Viridiana in 1978. García confessed he always got nervous (“butterflies in my stomach”) each time Víctor ate at his restaurant. He commanded respect even from friends and colleagues.

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At Viridiana Restaurant with chef Abraham García

Victor had academic expertise and as such was a member of the Academia Española de Gastronomía in Spain and the Académie Internationale du Vin in Switzerland. He ate a lot, and he liked Italian cars, which he drove very fast; he never had time to lose. He also loved blues and rock music. He didn’t have a lot of patience and often came across as grumpy and was famous for his online discussions. He was serious but kind and with a subtle sense of humor.

Awards didn’t impress him, but he had three Spanish gastronomy awards and many others, including an André Simon Book Award, given to him in London in 2011 for the book The Finest Wines of Rioja and Northwest Spain that he co-authored with me and Jesús Barquín from the Sherry project Equipo Navazos. But he was most proud of being the dean of restaurant critics in Spain, having written an uninterrupted weekly column about restaurants for over 40 years.

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Tasting with the late Marcel Juge in Cornas

He was kind of hyperactive; I remember seeing him at his office in the newspaper typing on the computer keypad, talking on the phone (the landline with a cable, holding the receiver between his head and shoulder), reading a Reuters screen and watching an NBA game on the television, all at the same time! He was a perfectionist, not very good at delegating, so he did most of the stuff himself. He learned to do everything. He was a kind person, close to his friends, very well educated and respectful but with very strong opinions about most subjects in life. He taught and inspired many in his profession and in his passions. He has many disciples, among whom I’m proud to count myself.

I wouldn’t be where I am and who I am today without Víctor de la Serna. We ate and drank our way through a good part of Europe together, Spain, Portugal, France, especially the Northern Rhône, where we had unforgettable visits with people like Gérard Chave, Jamet and Marcel Juge. Victor was one of the people that spoke to Robert Parker about me, and one of the reasons why I was hired to work at Robert Parker Wine Advocate in 2013.

It’s really tough to write an obituary for a friend. He was my hero and later my master, mentor and friend, with whom I drank the best wines in the world. I admired his work and learned a lot of what I know about wine (and many other things in life) from him.

Víctor, we’re going to miss you terribly.

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