Victor de la Serna

Victor de la Serna (Madrid, 1947) is a classically trained journalist (Columbia University), reporter, foreign correspondent, editor-in-chief, who didn't start writing about wine and gastronomy until 1981, at El País. But he had already long been fascinated by wine and its culture, thanks to the teachings of his father, Victor de la Serna Gutiérrez-Répide, second president of the AIV, who remained in that post until shortly before his death in 1983.

The family lived in Geneva from 1955 to 1963, and De la Serna (son) became acquainted with the culture of vines and wine while still a teenager, on the weekend hikes he took with his father in Burgundy, Jura, Valais, Vaud and the northern Rhône. In 1960, he had his first glimpse of a small vineyard where, his father told him, "the best wine in the world is born". It was Romanée-Conti.

His stint at El País was followed by his entry into the team that founded El Mundo in 1989, as assistant to the director, where he was from the outset a food critic and created a wine culture website, elmundovino, pioneering the return to tradition, to noble terroir wines, in Spain after the technological drifts and high-yield industrial wine production of the 1970s-90s.

It was as a journalist that he joined the AIV and won three National Prizes from the Royal Academy of Gastronomy in Spain and an André Simon Award in Great Britain, but he also tried to lead by example by creating a small winery, Finca Sandoval, in a little-known part of south-eastern Spain, La Manchuela, which he developed from 1998 to 2020 before letting younger successors continue its development.