Chivite

The Chivite paper trail starts with a notarised deed of 1647 - Juan Chivite Frías borrowing 100 ducats against a winery and a vineyard on the Cascante road - and the family counts eleven generations of Navarra wine from it, which makes them older on paper than the great commercial Rioja houses, R. López de Heredia included. The name itself came over the Pyrenees in the 16th century, from Çibitz in Basse-Navarre. The house's first great chapter was logistics: in 1860, as oidium and then phylloxera gutted French supply, Claudio Chivite opened a Cintruénigo-Bayonne-Bordeaux route with twelve relay carts and got the firm registered as Spanish exporter number 120 - bulk wine north while Rioja's founding estates were still being built.

The modern pivot belongs to Julián Chivite Marco (d. 1996), who branded the wines and installed one of Spain's first bottling lines in 1956, and to his son Fernando, who created the Gran Feudo rosado in the 1980s and drove Colección 125 - the flagship line launched in 1985 to mark 125 years since that first export. The quiet co-author was Denis Dubourdieu, the house's self-described "oenologue caché" and his only Spanish consultancy, from 1993 until his death in 2016: barrel-fermented, lees-aged whites and rosados, restrained oak, and a stated pursuit of finesse at what he called the extreme northern limit of Tempranillo. César Muñoz consults since 2016; David González has been technical director since 2023.

Today the house operates from Finca Legardeta at Villatuerta in Tierra Estella - 245+ ha with about 103 under vine at ~450 m, loamy clay-limestone over calcareous sandstone, an Atlantic-continental climate with sharp late-summer day-night swings; Tempranillo, Garnacha, Chardonnay and Syrah. Two estates are history now: Cintruénigo, the 1872 home cellar, is the base of sister winery Gran Feudo, and Señorío de Arínzano - bought 1988, given a Rafael Moneo winery, made northern Spain's first Vino de Pago in 2007 - was sold to SPI Group in 2015 amid the family's rough decade: a strategy split, Fernando's removal from the presidency in 2011, Julián Chivite López's return in 2012, a bank-held majority under the restructuring, and finally the 2017 sale of the whole group to Grup Peralada, with Julián staying on as president.

The range runs in three tiers plus one outlier: Las Fincas (from 2015, with chef Juan Mari Arzak - pale sangrado Garnacha-Tempranillo rosado and a two-Garnachas white under IGP 3 Riberas), Finca Legardeta estate varietals, and Colección 125 - barrel-fermented Chardonnay from the Las Mercedes plot, the bled and oak-fermented Rosado, a Tempranillo Reserva, and the late-harvest Moscatel Vendimia Tardía from El Candelero. La Zorrera, a single-vineyard Garnacha, joined in 2019.