Amaya Cervera (Gernika, Vizcaya, 54 years old) was not planning to dedicate herself to wine, but today she has just received the National Gastronomy Award for Gastronomic Communication for, in the words of the president of the jury, Mikel Zeberio: “Being a great disseminator and knowledgeable about the culture of wine, a virtuous professional of communication and of feeling wine in all its meanings”.
Cervera says that he was born “in a good year for Spanish wine (1968), in a family where cooking was appreciated and, furthermore, in the Basque Country, where gastronomy is very important and the quality of the raw material is valued” . He studied journalism at the University of Navarra and an interview in Madrid with José Peñín, one of the Spanish journalists and writers with the longest track record on winemaking, changed his life. “I was amazed that people could make a living from wine and I thought what a beautiful job,” he recalls. It was 1996 and the Guía Peñín, specialized in wines, already had a name in the sector. “Then I had the opportunity to work on the documentation of a book that Peñín was writing called world strains. I spent two months in her library looking for information on varieties and I discovered a wonderful world, the connection of wine with history and geography”, she says. There the flame of curiosity was lit in her, which increased as she read more, accompanied Peñín to visit wineries and did tastings.
In a discreet way, as he is known for, he listened, observed and soaked up everything that was new to him. “The day came when Peñín told me: now you are going to taste by yourself. And I realized that the most difficult thing is to find the right words to describe the wine. Then it’s a matter of practice. I don’t have better technical skills than anyone else, it’s applying the senses and knowing how to contextualize it”. She became editor-in-chief of the magazine Foodiesdirected the magazine on-line of todvinofrom 2004 to 2013, and joined the journalist Yolanda Ortiz de Arri, who had worked on the website of the newspaper Financial Times, to open your own digital portal. “In 2013 it became clear to me that if you don’t write in English you don’t exist. The great communicators internationally have always been Anglo-Saxon and the language of wine communication was English,” she says.
In 2014 it saw the light Spanish Wine Loverits bilingual website (Spanish and English) specialized in wine. “Then the revolution of the new producers was already underway, the recovery of forgotten varieties and new wine-producing areas such as Gredos or the Mediterranean were emerging. Our idea when setting up this portal was that anyone interested in wine who read the great international prescribers would find something rigorous and in-depth about Spanish wine”. And the National Prize that they have awarded him today confirms that that intuition transformed into a way of life was necessary.
“The important thing is to focus on stories,” says Cervera. “I enjoy visiting new producers who provide different ways of working, studying recovered varieties and then writing about it. In addition, on the web we also create an agenda where we inform about all the tastings and events related to wine that take place in different Spanish cities”.
Next year his project turns a decade old and, looking back, he recognizes that Spanish Wine Lover It has opened many doors for him. “For example, being able to taste at the Decanter World Wine Awards, with sommeliers from all over the world, and discovering that people know about our website,” she says. In addition, since 2020, Cervera has written the Wine Stories section in EL PAÍS SEMANAL, “where I put myself in the shoes of a general public and in each article I tell a story.” He is also a member of the Circle of Wine Writers and has been a juror in different wine competitions such as Bacchus, BIWA in Italy or the Decanter World Wine Awards. “Many times people think that I am a winemaker, but I have no technical training and I lack knowledge of chemistry. I am just a journalist who has specialized in a specific field and who enjoys thinking about the consumer, and how to convey the trends and new challenges in the sector”.
The 2023 National Gastronomy Awards ceremony will be held on October 3 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid.
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