Víctor de la Serna, a tireless journalist

Víctor de la Serna (Madrid, 1947), journalist, wine producer and food and wine critic, died today of a stroke.

A multifaceted, vehemently opinionated figure with a remarkable memory, De la Serna was born into a family of writers and journalists (he was preceded by two other Victor de la Serna's) who had a keen interest in gastronomy. He was the great-grandson of the writer Concha Espina and the son of the food columnist Nines Arenillas. Thanks to the diplomatic career of his father, Víctor de la Serna Gutiérrez-Répide, he received a privileged education for his generation. He studied at the Collège de Genève in Geneva, the French Lycée in New York and was the first Spanish graduate of Columbia University in New York with a degree in journalism.

He spoke fluent English, French and Italian. For five decades he worked for practically all the leading Spanish newspapers: Informaciones, Diario 16, El País and El Mundo, of which he was a founder and deputy editor. He wrote basketball chronicles under the pseudonym Vicente Salaner and food columns as Fernando Point.

As a critic, he was an authoritative voice in the Spanish wine world and the driving force behind the website elmundovino.com, which published a series of memorable articles and championed blind tasting. A member of the International Wine Academy with extensive knowledge of the classic wine regions, he eventually set up his own winery in the "humble" region of Manchuela, in Castilla-La Mancha, as he liked to describe it.

He was sorely missed at the recent 50th anniversary of the National Gastronomy Awards. He actually won three of them: for food writing, for promoting Spanish wine around the world, and for best online publication for elmundovino.