Chivite’s own website runs a “Milestones” page listing 373 years of the winery’s history, year by year, down to which magazine put which vintage on its cover. It logs a 1999 blind tasting, a 2004 royal wedding, a 2010 Nobel Peace Prize dinner in Oslo. It does not log 2017. That is the year a Catalan company bought the winery outright, and it is the single most consequential event in Bodegas Chivite‘s modern history, absent from the very page built to record its modern history.
This matters because “Spain’s oldest wine-producing family business,” the framing nearly every English-language source repeats without qualification, is no longer an accurate description of who owns the winery. It is an accurate description of whose surname is on the label and whose face still represents it in public. Those are different facts, and conflating them means a reader comes away thinking they are buying from an independent family estate when they are buying from a division of a Catalan wine and cava group. Neither fact is bad. Only one of them is what the marketing implies.
This article draws on Chivite’s own history and milestones pages, the acquiring company’s own 2017 announcement and its parent holding entity’s current corporate site, contemporaneous trade-press coverage from The Drinks Business, and an independent wine-trade profile from Spanish Wine Lover that reports directly on the winery’s post-acquisition winemaking changes.
A 1647 Loan Document, Not a Founding Legend
Most old wine dynasties trace themselves to a founding legend. Chivite traces to a loan. In August 1647, Juan Chivite Frías and his sister-in-law María Rubio, widow of Joseph Chivite, borrowed 100 ducats from the Ana Sanz Foundation, pledging a winery as collateral. The notarised deed describes that winery in specific terms: capable of producing up to 150 “cántaros,” an archaic Spanish measure of roughly 17 litres each, situated next to the Camino Real, with a vineyard of 30 “jornales,” a traditional unit for a laborer’s working-day of land, on the road toward Cascante. A winery that size was never a household operation. It was already a commercial concern in 1647, which is what makes the date defensible rather than decorative.
The Chivite name itself came from further away. The first bearers of the surname arrived in Navarra‘s Ebro Valley in the 16th century from Çibitz, a village in what is now French Baja Navarra (Basse-Navarre), fleeing the Calvinist Wars that had devastated the area. By the time of the 1647 document, the family had been established in southern Navarra for roughly a century.
One detail from the family’s own archive rarely makes it into English coverage at all: during the Peninsular War, between 1808 and 1814, Chivite supplied wine to the occupying Napoleonic troops, a transaction documented through surviving invoices and receipts the family still holds. It is a small, morally neutral footnote of wartime commerce, not a story about the war itself, but it is one more data point in an unusually well-documented 17th-through-19th-century paper trail that most competing wineries simply cannot produce.
Claudio Chivite Turned a French Disaster Into an Export Business
The winery’s actual commercial breakthrough came in 1860, and it came from someone else’s misfortune. Claudio Chivite, who already managed the local “garapito del vino,” a regional tax on wine sold, imported, and exported through Cintruénigo, watched the oidium blight and the phylloxera epidemic that followed devastate vineyards around Bordeaux. Where French supply was collapsing, he saw an opening and built a trade route: Cintruénigo to Bayonne to Bordeaux, run by twelve heavy four-wheeled carts called “aceleradas,” each hauling up to six “pipes” of 600 litres of wine, mule teams swapped out at each station so six carts were always rolling out while six more came back loaded with French goods to sell at home.
That 1860 export run is why the winery’s flagship wine range carries the name it does. In 1985, to mark the 125th anniversary of that first export, Chivite released Colección 125, now the winery’s prestige tier. The name is not a marketing flourish invented later; it is a direct, dated callback to a specific transaction the family itself can document.
Julián Chivite Marco Modernized It. Denis Dubourdieu Made It Famous.
The winery’s 20th-century transformation runs through one man across roughly forty years. Julián Chivite Marco (1910 to 1996) began major renovations in 1956, launched the family’s first proper wine brands, and installed one of the first bottling plants anywhere in Spain. In 1992 the King of Spain decorated him with the Order of Agricultural Merit.
The wine world took broader notice starting in 1993, when Denis Dubourdieu, the influential French oenologist and Bordeaux professor, began advising Chivite. Dubourdieu is credited with creating Chivite Colección 125 Blanco and its late-harvest Muscat-à-Petit-Grains, “Vendimia Tardía,” and he kept consulting until his death in 2016, at which point César Muñoz, his assistant since 2012, took over. The results were not subtle: Colección 125 Blanco 1997 was judged the world’s best white wine in a 1999 blind tasting against 23 international whites, and the 2005 vintage later scored 99 out of 100 from the Spanish wine guide Guía Peñín, a mark only two other white wines had ever received in that guide’s history. Along the way, Colección 125 was poured at the NATO Summit gala in 1997, the 2004 royal wedding of Felipe VI and Letizia, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize banquet in Oslo, and the 2018 state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
What Actually Changed in 2017, and What Didn’t
On October 18, 2017, Grupo Perelada, the Catalan producer behind Castillo Perelada in the Empordà, announced it had bought the Chivite Group in full: the Chivite winery itself, Bodegas Gran Feudo, and Viña Salceda in Rioja Alavesa, for an undisclosed sum, as part of a strategic expansion plan Perelada had adopted in 2015. Javier Suqué, Perelada’s chairman, said at the time that “Julián will continue as President and will help steer this new business,” and he has. That single sentence is likely why nothing about Chivite’s public identity had to visibly change: the family’s most recognizable figure kept his title.
But the ownership itself did change, and it did not stay with the Chivites. The combined entity’s own current corporate site, operating as Peralada Chivite, states plainly that “the Suqué Mateu family, owner of Perelada & Chivite,” is the controlling family, tracing their own connection to wine back to Miguel Mateu’s 1923 purchase of Castillo Perelada, not to anything in Navarra. Winemaking oversight at Chivite passed to David González, a winemaker with extensive Rioja experience, who has largely preserved the Colección 125 style while making measured adjustments: picking Chardonnay slightly earlier, adding a touch of Syrah back into the rosé, and reintroducing Cabernet Sauvignon to a red blend that had drifted toward single-varietal Tempranillo before he arrived. That 1993 Chardonnay vintage was not just a Chivite milestone. It landed fourteen years before Rioja, Navarra’s better-known neighbor, would even legalize the grape, a gap covered in Encierro’s full history of Navarra Chardonnay.
None of that appears on Chivite’s own Milestones page, which runs entries for 1647, 1860, 1956, 1985, 1993, 1996 through 1999, 2004, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2015 through 2020, with nothing at all for 2017. The History page ends the same way it always has: “Today, this family legacy is perpetuated by the eldest of the Chivites, Julián Chivite López.” Both statements are true. Neither one mentions who signs off on the company’s decisions now.
What’s in the Glass Today
J. Chivite Family Estates, based at the roughly 600-hectare Finca Legardeta on the slopes of Montejurra in Navarra’s Tierra Estella sub-zone, sells three ranges. Colección 125 remains the flagship, running from about 30 to 60 euros a bottle. Finca Legardeta, priced from roughly 15 to 18 euros, focuses on single-varietal expressions of Chardonnay, Syrah, and Garnacha. Las Fincas, around 13 euros, comes out of a 2015 collaboration with three-Michelin-star San Sebastián chef Juan Mari Arzak, a partnership that produced a pale rosé and, from 2019, a red-and-white Garnacha blend called 2 Garnachas.
Legardeta sits further north, and gets more rain, than any vineyard in Rioja, conditions closer to Bordeaux that allow planting densities up to 6,000 vines per hectare in places; the nearby Ega River tempers the site against frost and helps generate the autumn mists that favour noble rot in the late-harvest Muscat. Bodegas Gran Feudo, split off as a separate, higher-volume winery years before the Perelada sale, remains the commercial face of Navarra’s rosé tradition at large scale, now operating as its own entity within the Perelada & Chivite portfolio.
Chivite’s arc, a single documented name stretching back to 1647 and then quietly changing hands in 2017, is not unique in Navarra. Bodegas Ochoa in nearby Olite tells a very different version of the same regional story: a family winery that stayed a family winery, built instead on a stint running Navarra’s own state viticulture institute. Both sit within the same DO Navarra framework of five sub-zones that has governed the region’s wine since 1933, and both prove there is no single template for how a Navarra bodega survives a century, let alone four.
FAQ
Who owns Bodegas Chivite now?
Since October 2017, Chivite has been owned by Grupo Perelada, a Catalan wine and cava producer controlled by the Suqué Mateu family, who also own Castillo Perelada in the Empordà. Julián Chivite has continued as president of the business since the sale.
Is Bodegas Chivite still a family business?
It carries a family name and a family president, but the controlling ownership is not the Chivite family. The winery is part of Grupo Perelada, whose parent corporate site names the Suqué Mateu family as the owner of the combined Perelada and Chivite operation.
How old is Bodegas Chivite?
The winery’s documented link to wine dates to a notarised loan deed from August 1647, making it one of the oldest wine-producing names in Spain, though the current corporate entity has operated under different ownership since 2017.
What is Chivite Colección 125?
Colección 125 is Chivite’s flagship wine range, released in 1985 to mark the 125th anniversary of Claudio Chivite’s first wine export to Bordeaux in 1860. It includes a white, a red, a rosé, and a late-harvest Muscat, developed for two decades with Bordeaux oenologist Denis Dubourdieu.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.