OUR STORY
WOODSTOCK
While listening to Santana’s live performance of Soul Sacrifice on the stage of Woodstock in the summer of 1969, Guy de Poix, then only 14 years old, had an epiphany: he needed to honour his family tradition, but he needed to let his spirit guide him in his pursuits. Guy was the youngest son of the Poix family, a French noble family dating back to the 17th century, with an old tradition in wine, being involved in the ownership of the Piper Heidsieck champagne and owning and managing the Domaine Peraldi in Corsica to this day.
HAILSTORM EPIPHANY
On a foggy November evening in 1994, after a disappointing trip to Moldova, driving back to Bucharest Guy was pondering if that vision he had as a teenager was anything more than just a vision. At one point, he saw a sign for Ceptura and remembered they were told in one of their previous trips to Transylvania that they make good wine in Ceptura. They got off the road and wandered into a winery that, from the outside, looked like any other communist reminiscent winery they’ve been visiting for the past 18 months. But from the inside.. Guy was clearly interested. It smelled like good wine and it was cleaner than shops he knew in his favourite region- Burgundy.
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THE FETEASCA LEGACY
Upon tasting it Guy had an immediate smile on his face, and according to Mihaela something changed in that room at that very moment. That moment marks the true birth of Romania’s first private winery after the fall of communism: la Societe Euro-Roumaine des Vins d’Exception with the mission of bringing Romainan excellence in winemaking to European tables through mastering the Feteasca Neagra.
It took Aurel and Mihaela 20 years and the help of a team with decades of dedication to Guy’s vision to replicate systematically what God gave them in 1994.
CORSICA TO ROMANIA
In 1991, after meeting Cristophe George and making sure Domaine Peraldi is in good hands, Guy set out to find what that epiphany he had almost 20 years ago was all about. He arrived in Romania, where he met Mihaela - then Badea, who would immediately become his partner- first in wine, and more than a decade later in life. Together they set out to find what Guy was looking for- with neither of them truly knowing what that was.
HEAD WINEMAKER
"That's when they met Aurel"
The workday had ended an hour before their arrival, so they were surprised to see Aurel Rotarescu- the one who would become and remain to this day SERVE’s Head Winemaker. Aurel had Guy taste a Feteasca Neagra he was working on. Bear in mind that back then, the Feteasca Neagra that is today Romania’s flagship varietal- was only produced as a sweet wine for volume, with very rare instances of quality batches. But that year, a violent hail had destroyed 90% of Aurel’s yield for Feteasca Neagra, so he decided to take whatever was left and craft it into a “wine essence”.
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GUY'S LEGACY
In 2014, 3 years after Guy’s tragic death, Cuvee Guy de Poix (Feteasca Neagra single varietal) became the first authentic romanian single varietal to be evaluated with over 90 points by Robert Parker.
The circle was closed, the Woodstock vision was accomplished: Guy sacrificed himself to save a varietal from extinction and in the process created a beautiful arch of brotherhood between his children that are managing the Domaine Peraldi in Corsica and Mihaela’s children who are managing SERVE in Romania.