Lolita Sene
Saint-Victor-la-Coste, Rhône, France

Lolita Sène’s path to becoming one of the southern Rhône’s most exciting young micro-vigneronnes has been anything but conventional. A Nîmes native, she began her career in the late 2000s as an artistic director of a Paris nightclub—a whirlwind, cocaine-fueled chapter she later chronicled in her novel, C: la face noire de la blanche. After moving to Montpellier in the early 2010s to study agronomy and business, she discovered natural wine while working at the (mostly conventional) wine bar Tringue Fougasse. This revelation profoundly shaped her ambitions, and by 2018, she had returned to her native Gard to begin making her own wines.

Lolita’s journey to winemaking was marked by twists across continents. After publishing her novel in 2015, she traveled the U.S. as a reporter for the French travel guide Le Petit Futé. Later, she worked as a sommelière in Vancouver and Toronto, where she gained a reputation as a fervent advocate for natural wine. But it wasn’t until she returned to France that her story as a vigneronne truly began.

Starting with just 1,500 bottles of négociant wine in 2018, Lolita initially worked out of a shared cellar in Gajan near Uzès. That same year, she acquired a neglected parcel of Grenache in Saint-Victor-la-Coste—a purchase made possible when the former owners, familiar with her literary career, agreed to sell the plot separately from the rest of their estate. The vines had been chemically farmed and left uncared for, with machine-pruning leaving them in dire condition. “I hadn’t noticed how much work it would take,” she admits, recalling her first harvest, which mildew wiped out entirely. Armed with only manual clippers, she began the painstaking work of restoring the vines.

Over time, she expanded her holdings to include 0.30 hectares of Cinsault and 0.35 hectares of Syrah, and in 2021, she planted an additional 0.20 hectares of Cinsault in collaboration with her partner, Nicolas Renaud of Clos des Grillons. That year also marked her move into a new cellar adjacent to Renaud’s, a space they constructed together.

Today, Lolita farms 2ha of vines organically and produces micro-quantities of wine with a deeply personal, handcrafted approach. She works without pumps, relies on a small manual press, and fills barrels with a bucket. Her production has grown to 7,500 bottles as of 2020, and reaching 10,000 in 2022 including both négociant wines and those from her own vines. Her Grenache and Syrah are blended into the cuvée Adorable, while her Cinsault yields Coucous. Each wine is unfined, unfiltered, and made with zero sulfur.

Lolita’s wines reflect her unorthodox path—raw, idiosyncratic, and unpolished in the best sense, with a homemade allure reminiscent of confidential cellar experiments. Despite her still-evolving career, her wines are already in high demand and difficult to find. As she puts it, her motto remains simple: “Start small, stay small.”