In the heart of the Corbières countryside, when he was 35, Stéphane Serre started making wine. With conviction, a real philosophy and a result in the glass that makes him a producer with a difference, in the most noble sense. A status he assumes with a communicative passion. 
It is a spring day, and the sky seems to be mourning the month of April which is on the wane. The mist clings to the hilltops around the Val de Dagne. In the vineyard, the earth sticks to the soles of your shoes. In his wine cellar which is roughly the size of a laboratory, Stéphane Serre is already focusing on the harvest to come. “We won't start to pick the grapes before 15 October”, he predicts.
This is how he is, this Corbières wine maker, deeply-rooted in his native land, his heart attached to the family history and his mind incessantly racing towards the future. When he rolls out the family tree, he knows that already back in 1613 one of his ancestors lived here and worked the land. “This close connection to the Corbières is stronger than anything. Farmers, winemakers, shepherds, coopers and even bakers, we produced, transformed and always worked in the service of this soil and the very best it could give us”.
From his father, Jacques Serre, and his grandfather Elie Raynaud, Stéphane Serre has inherited a passion for his native soil and the desire to get the very best out of it in a respectful way.
Paradoxically, while his father, Jacques, was a very militant actor in the sphere of the cooperative, Stéphane decided to take a step back. Or rather, a step up: “I trained to be a mountain guide. A first career that was rather short, because I then studied commercial subjects and communication.”
The rest resembles the workings of a mountaineer continuously seeking out the best way forward. He had a vague project but was not really able to pin it down. First of all, Stéphane Serre joined the family operation, learn the basics of winemaking, then went back to commerce, endeavouring to optimally promote the products from his home region.
He was very close at one point to calling everything into question, by accepting a job offer in South America. But fate is capricious and luck is a gambler. While he was convalescing after a serious horse-riding accident, he was gripped by a sort of inspiration: his religion would be wine and his credo would be difference! “I simply understood that the grapevine was my life.This choice, it was life that made it for me and something was pulling me here when in fact, when I was a boy, my father tried his best to put me off this profession”.
On the plots scattered over 4 hectares that constitute the basis of his estate, L’Amandyère, the neo-vigneron has never ceased to learn, since his establishment in 2007 and his first vintage, two years later. “I am a self-taught winemaker, this is an advantage because I don't have any limits. By definition, I knew I would do this job differently because it is also a passion. And as I am fortunate enough to be on fabulous soil, one of the best in Languedoc-Roussillon, I have total faith in my project!”.
Faith that it was not always easy to share. With his father, first of all, who watched him take his first steps with circumspection. With the bankers, too, who were reluctant to back him. Not forgetting his friends and the other winemakers. “When I started, no-one would take me seriously. Whether it was about the quality I was aiming for or the price I intended to impose in this region. But I love risk and I can't do anything if there is no danger involved!”.
Not only did he involve his nearest and dearest and his suppliers, but he himself showed the example: “I gave everything! My time, my money and my energy. All I did was invest in the future”. And then people began to share the faith that was driving him. “I sold my first bottles to some British customers when I didn't even have any wine for them to taste, because the wine would take two years to mature!”. This first vintage, 2009, was a real “garage wine” (supercuvée). And not just any old garage, it was grandpa Elies', in the centre of the village of Montlaur. He is 90 years old and still has a twinkle in his eye when he talks about the major demonstrations of the winemakers back in the seventies. He also has the palate of a connoisseur when he tastes his grandson's wine.
A rare pleasure, and for good reason. By choosing to offer a wine labelled exceptional in the same way as designers with haute couture clothes or goldsmiths who produce unique pieces of jewellery, Stéphane Serre set himself strict rules.
At harvest time, 50% of the grapes are left on the vine because they do not match the desired quality, and 20% are removed during the final sorting”. And so for the moment, annual production does not exceed 3,000 bottles. He has set himself the target of 10,000 necks in 2015.
“Here, we don't speak in hectolitres but in litres”, he explains once more. This enthusiast of rationalised agriculture respects the lunar calendar in all the major phases of work on the vine and then on the wine: “and we don't speak in terms of bunches, but of grapes. And one grape, depending on the vat and its final destination, is worth between €0.70 and €2”. Grapes that he sometimes compares to caviar grains, or even to gem stones. “I think of myself as a wine jeweller who starts from the rough gem and transforms it into a jewel. This is what I do with wine. Only red for the moment, but in the near future the time will come to set off on the same adventure with white wine”.
In the meantime, he watches over the rubies that a whole team is sorting one by one in the cellar. A small area surrounded by red vats which are so many museum pieces: “They were used in the laboratory of the Aude Chamber of Agriculture to make the very first Corbières AOC wines. Thanks to my father, I saved them from the scrap heap. They have all been renovated and with their low capacity, I can more easily make the different vintages that constitute the estate's calling card”. But at the same time, this voluble vigneron has invested in the latest equipment, such as a unit which produces cold or heat and can be used to adjust the temperature of each vat to within a tenth of a degree.
Stéphane Serre designed his own distinctive brand logo, a vine in the shape of the Y in AmandYère, and intends to conquer the world of lovers of wines that are out of the ordinary, or even outside of time. “After that, I will repeat this model on other growing areas that fascinate me in Languedoc-Roussillon.”
A wine aesthete who is ambitious and has his own story to write.
Jean Bernard
Photos : Ludovic Charles
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