Founded in 1647, Bodegas Julián Chivite is the oldest wine producing dynasty in Spain. Over eleven generations, the firm has grown from its original establishment in Navarra to estates in Rioja and Ribera del Duero, and become the most important, as well as one of the most respected, producers and exporters of Navarra’s wines. Embracing the best of the region’s traditions and the technology that has transformed it from the end of the 1980s onward, Bodegas Julián Chivite has forged a reputation for quality and consistency second to none in the D.O.

It is thought that the first of the family to use the Chivite surname migrated to the Ebro Valley in the 16th century from Çibitz, in the north of the kingdom, in Navarra de Ultrapuertos. The historic context of this period is significant. Navarra became part of unified Spain in 1479 when Fernando of Aragón and Isabelle of Castilla joined their kingdoms in marriage under the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, considerable French influence remained from the three centuries between the mid-1100s and the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453, during the latter part of which Navarra was under the rule of Henry II of England through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose dowry included not only Aquitane (now Bordeaux) but Narvarra as well. When England lost the war in 1453, Aquitaine was returned to France, but not Navarra.

This dual influence placed Navarra, Aragón and the Basque Country in the eye of the Calvinist Wars. The Reformation, the seeds of which were sown by Martin Luther in the 1529 Colloquy of Marburg, incited over a century of conflict over the break between the Catholic Church and Protestantism, at the heart of which was the Vatican’s role in the authority of the state versus the secularization of rule. The Colloquy effectively allowed monarchs to dictate whether Catholcism or Protestantism would prevail in their realms.

John Calvin’s publication of “Institutes of the Christian Religion” in Basel in 1536 enormously heightened the debate. As it spread throughout Europe, the lines were drawn: Scandanavia, the Netherlands and Scotland turned Calvinist; England, under Henry VIII, broke with Rome in 1534 to form the Church of England. Charles V of Spain and his successor, Phillip II, were staunchly Catholic. France also remained Catholic under François I, but Calvinism gained an entrenched, defiant minority in the Huguenots, one of whose most powerful proponents was Henry of Navarra. The Wars of Religion were only brought to an end and tolerance achieved in 1598, when Henry returned to the Catholic Church, became Henry IV and issued the Edict of Nantes. The conflict had spurred a great exodus from the north of Navarra towards the south.

The Chivite name is first documented in connection with production of wine in the 17th century. A notarized loan dated August, 1647, in which Juan Chivite Frías and his sister-in-law María Rubio request one hundres ducats from the Fundación Ana Sanz for a land lease, guarantees repayment in the following terms: “La bodega que tiene con asta con 150 cántaros de cubamento que alinta a casa de Pedro Ximenez Larrañaga y el camino real, una viña de 30 peonadas en la carretera de Cascante.” (“The bodega with a capacity to produce 150 cántaros [a barrel with a capacity of 11.39 litters] of wine covers the area of Pedro Ximenes Larrañaga’s house and El Camino Real [“the Royal Road”], one vineyard of 1,320 square feet located in Cascante Road.”) A “peonada” is an old term for a work shift, typically, how much land a worker can cultivate or harvest in one day, and is equal to 44 square feet. The extent of the vineyard indicates a bodega of substantial size.


Between the middle of the 1600s and the end of the 1700s, the Chivite history is sparsely documented. Wills reflecting the transfer of wineries and vineyards are the only record of the family during the period: that of Juan Chivite Navascués in 1678; of Joseph Chivite Navascués in 1709; and of Juán Chivite Hernández in 1779. José Chivite, who lived between 1791 and 1846, carries the thread of the family activities from the end of the 18th century into the mid 19th. José was succeeded in the family enterprise by his son, Claudio Chivite Rández (1816-1877), the first dynamic businessman to direct Bodegas Chivite toward its present prominence. He is referred to as an “arrendador del garapito,” roughly the equivalent to the office of a district attorney to whom wine traders and producers were required to pay fees for any wine imported to or sold in the area.
The early part of the 1800s in Navarra’s history was marked by instability caused by the Carlist Wars under the reign of Isabel II. The three Carlist Wars, which took place between 1833 and 1876, centered on the repeal of the Salic Law. Passed in the early 1700s by Philip V as a measure to prevent the Hapsburgs from retaking the Spanish throne through female dynastic accession, it prohibited a woman from inheriting the crown of Spain. Just prior to his death in 1833, Ferdinand VII repealed the law in order to pass the throne to his infant daughter, Isabella II, under the auspices of her mother, Queen Regent Maria Cristina de Náploles. This barred his brother, Infante Carlos, who would otherwise have assumed the throne, from becoming king, and split the country into two factions known as the Cristinos and the Carlists.

The deeper context of the conflict lay in the first Spanish constitution, a liberal and enlightened document drafted in 1812 during the war of independence against Napoleon. Following the war, Ferdinand VII was returned to the throne. In the Manifest of Valencia, he annulled the constitution, restoring his powers as absolute monarch, and reinstituted the Spanish Inquisition, which had been abolished by Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte. After Ferdinand’s death, it became clear to the powerful absolutist party which had supported him that Cristina and Isabella would rule more liberally. In an attempt to secure their control, they put Carlos forward as rightful ruler under the precedent of the Salic Law.

Although the Carlist Wars were waged in various places at various times throughout Spain, the center of the conflict was in the northeast, in Aragón and the Basque Country, home of the Carlists. Carlos V never assumed the throne. In 1868, when Isabella II was overthrown by a conspiracy, the liberal conspirators installed Duke Amadeo of Aosta, son of Victor Emmanuel of Italy, as king. The Carlist pretension to the throne would endure through the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 through 1939. With General Francisco Franco at the fascist end of the political spectrum, the Carlists finally found themselves on the winning side. Yet the victory resulted in Franco’s absorbing their military and political wings into his National Movement.

Beyond the disruption of civil war, the wine producing sector of the economy was affected by a string of weak harvests that led producers in northern Spain to import musts from southern provinces in order to enhance the quality of their wines. The 1855 classification of the wines of Bordeaux not only introduced the idea of a hierarchal ranking of wines based on price and quality, but also made the figure of the négociant as producer and trader fashionable. When the vineyards of France began to deteriorate under the onslaught first of oidium and then of phylloxera, which would not reach Spain until the turn of the century, the conditions were in place for astute producers to benefit. Claudio Chivite Rández took advantage of these converging factors and in 1860, in the face of plummeting production in France, began to export wines to the north.

Under Claudio Chivite began a period of tremendous development and expansion for the firm which would inform the attitude of the generations to follow. His export business hinged on twelve “galeras,” large, four-wheeled, mule drawn carts able to transport up to six 600-litre barrels. The commerce was so brisk and the method of shipment so expedient that the galeras became known as “aceleradas,” or “speedies.” Six of them made the outbound journey to France and the other six the one homeward. On an invoice dated 1870 to a Bayonne wholesaler, a Monsieur Lafarque, the price of seven “reales,” equivalent to a quarter of the old peseta, was quoted per “churn” of wine, each of which held sixteen litres. In all likelihood some of these wines found their way into the Bordeaux bottles of that and other vintages.

Claudio Chivite’s business grew, and in 1872 he began construction of a bodega in Calle Caballeros in the “La Cascajera” quarter of the city of Cintruénigo, at its present location. The name evoking the maybe rocky origin of this early settlement.

On Claudio Chivite Rández’s death in 1877, the trading enterprise passed to his son Felix Chivite Francés, who from the age of thirty carried on in the entreprenurial spirit of his father for the next half century. He continued to export wines to France and established an office in the Alhóndiga quarter of Bilbao, which at that time was the center of the Spanish wine trade and a dynamic hub of transactions where the Chivite name was prominent among the ranks of respected wine merchants. Around then, his mother, Juana Francés y Gimenez bought the house at 2Madrid Street in Cintruenigo as the family residence. The building was called “The General Inn”, an old posthouse frequented by buyers which directly contributed to a boost in the bodega´s prosperity. The coaches going to Madrid stopped at the Parador so that their occupants could obtain supplies, thus creating an outlet for all its musts. The Parador´s activity was both considerable and very popular, as a journalist from the newspaper Heraldo de Aragón recounted in some verses in 1898. When Felix Chivite died in 1928, the name of the firm was changed to “Viuda de Felix Chivite” (“Widow of Felix Chivite”) and subsequently to “Hijos de Felix Chivite” (Sons of Felix Chivite”).


Julián Chivite Marco (1910 – 1996) was the youngest of Felix Chivite’s thirteen children. On completion of his studies at the École de Commerce de Bordeaux in 1930, at the age of twenty, he returned to Cintruénigo to assume responsibility for the family bodega. The Spanish Civil War, which took place between 1936 and 1939, and its post-war period coinciding with the onset of World War II, created a conflicted political and depressed economic climate throughout Spain. Exports were required to conform to guidelines established by intergovernmental agreements that determined export quotas for all Spanish products. Julián Chivite was assigned the number 220 in the general exporters register.

Despite the reactionary restraints of Franco’s fascist regime, the Spanish economy gradually began to recover by the late 1940s and Spanish viticulture and wine production made strides toward modernization and recognition in the world market. In 1948, Julián Chivite made a major renovation of the bodega in the conviction that the future of Spain’s, and the world’s, wines, lay in commitment to quality. In 1967, the Regulatory Council of the Denominación de Origen de Navarra, of which Julián Chivite was a founding member, was created. In 1980, in recognition of his tremendous contributions to Spanish wine in the 20th century, Julián Chivite was paid special tribute by the Regulatory Council of the Denominación de Origen de Navarra, and in 1992 he was granted the Encomienda de la Orden del Mérito Agrario by the King of Spain. Following his death in 1997, the Navarre Government posthumously awarded him the Cruz de Carlos III el Noble “for having helped to situate the wines of Navarra among the most prestigious, both nationally and internationally; his bodega is today acknowledged to be one of the most prestigious in Spain.” In 1998, Bodegas Julián Chivite became a founding member of the Foundation for Wine Culture, created among five of the oldest and most prestigious wineries of Spain: Codorniu, Chivite, La Rioja Alta, Marques de Riscal and Vega Sicilia.

The bodega was again renovated in 1988, installing state of the art viticultural and vinification technology. Concurrently, vineyard ownership and contracts were expanded in Navarra’s best producing areas of Cintruénigo, Marcilla and Corella, including the purchase of the Señorío de Arínzano estate in Estella. In 1998, the Viña Salceda estate in Rioja Alavesa was acquired, followed by the Legardeta estate, adjoining the Arínzano estate, in 1999. The La Horra estate in Ribera del Duero, purchased in 2001, will release its first wine in 2008. The Chivite family's owned vineyard holdings currently total 1589 acres, with another 1063 under long-term contract. Annual production from all controlled vineyards currently averages roughly 800,000 cases under the direction of brothers Julián Chivite, General Manager and Fernando Chivite, Technical Director and Winemaker.

The original Chivite estate vineyards are located in Navarra Ribera Baja, at Cintruénigo and nearby Corella not far from the border with Rioja Baja, and in Navarra Ribera Alta, at Marcilla. The Cintruénigo and Corella vineyards together cover 198 acres and the Marcilla estate an additional 272. These are supplemented by two exclusive contract vineyards, one of 568 acres at Artajona and one of 247 acres at Eslava. These five properties are the anchor of Chivite’s production, the Gran Feudo range of wines. The varietal representation is predominantly Tempranillo and Garnacha with minor plantings of Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Muscat à Petit Grains. Vines average twenty years of age and are planted by variety according to microclimate. The winery, situated on the Cintruénigo estate, produces approximately 580,000 cases of wine per vintage with a capacity in cooperage of 18,000 300-liter barriques and an aging cellar of 16,000 barriques, of which 70 percent are in American oak and 30 percent in Allier. Slightly over a third of production in is Gran Feudo Rosado, a quarter in Gran Feudo Crianza and just under a fifth in Gran Feudo Reserva. The balance of production is in Chardonnay, Viñas Viejas Reserva and a highly rated Blanco Dulce Moscatel.

The Señorio de Arínzano estate is situated at Aberin near the town of Estella in Navarra Tierra Estella, and represents the benchmark of Chivite’s production. The original 803 acre estate was acquired in 1988 and extended in 1999 with the purchase of the -929 acre Legardeta estate adjacent to it. A cutting-edge winery designed and built by Rafael Moneo, winner of the 1996 Pritzker Prize in Architecture and member of Harvard University’s School of Architecture, was completed and inaugurated by their Royal Majesties the King and Queen of Spain in 2002. The Arínzano estate is the source of production for the Chivite Colección 125, of which the two principal wines are currently a barrique fermented Chardonnay and a Reserva, both distinctive, limited production, terroir-expressive wines.

The Arínzano vineyards lie at an elevation of 910 feet on soils of primarily tertiary origin with a small area dominated by glacial gravels. All vines are of a minimum age of twenty years and densely planted, with conservative pruning and a green harvest to sharply restrict yield to between 3,000 and 4,000 kilos per hectare (1.4 to 1.8 tons per acre). A system of water stress management known as “regulated deficit irrigation” controls soil moisture and water stress in the vineyard, a technique which maintains an optimum level of water tension in each vine to yield enhanced fruit quality. Plantings, tailored to soil profile and microclimate, are harvested and vinified separately, gathered by hand into small containers at harvest and sorted twice. Varietal representation is predominantly Tempranillo followed by Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Chardonnay.

The winery is tucked among the poplars along the river bank and the century-old oaks climbing the slopes that rise behind them. The facility is designed around state of the art technology which transfers the grapes and musts from one operation to the next in gentlest possible manner. An automatic system of conveyors runs through the crusher, situated in the highest point of the building, allowing gravity to accomplish movement. Two mobile presses further reduce movement of the musts. Fermentation takes place in small, technically advanced, wide-diameter stainless steel vats that are temperature controlled by computer. Thereafter, malolactic fermentation is carried out in a separate temperature controlled cellar in new, 225 liter Allier oak barriques where the wines remain through the aging period. Total production of the Chivite Colección 125 wines averages 45,000 cases per vintage. Consulting Winemaker Denise Dubourdieu, consultant also for Châteaux d´Yquem and Cheval Blanc, has overseen production at the Arínzano estate since.

The Viña Salceda Estate, in Rioja Alavesa, is located at Elciego, in the heart of Rioja’s most prestigious production centering on Cenicero, Haro and San Asensio, roughly ten miles northwest of Rioja’s principal city, Logroño. The estate was founded in 1969 and purchased by Bodegas Chivite in 1998. The Salceda estate proper covers 100 acres with another 247 acres, also in Rioja Alavesa, and a further more recently acquired 100 acres, in Rioja Alta, under long term contract. The vineyards all lie at elevations ranging between 900 and 1,100 feet above sea level. Vines average twenty years of age but some parcels support vines that are eighty years old. Varietal representation is traditional for Rioja, with 357 acres planted to Tempranillo and 45 each to Graciano and Mazuelo, collectively. Forty percent of the vines are trained to the double cordon system with vertical shoot positioning and the balance in the traditional head-pruned, “en vaso,” manner. Water is drawn from the Ebro River, which flows nearby, to supply a mobile sprinkler system when irrigation is required. Yields average 4,500 to 6,000 kilos per hectare (two to three tons per acre).

The fruit is gathered by hand, taken to the winery, sorted, destemmed and crushed. Following a cold maceration period of 48 hours, fermentation is initiated with selected yeasts in temperature controlled stainless steel tanks. Over a fermentation period of approximately six days, temperatures rise to a maximum of 86ºF with pumpovers carried out periodically. A post-fermentative maceration of one to two weeks precedes draining of the free run wine and extraction of the press wine, which is done is small basket presses. The malolactic fermentation ensues naturally, after which the preliminary varietal blends are assembled. The wine is then racked into225 liter, medium toast barriques; the components intended for Conde de la Salceda are aged in Allier oak and those for Viña Salceda Crianza and Reserva in American oak coopered in Rioja in the French method. The underground cellar, which Chivite has considerably expanded to a capacity of 8,000 barrels since acquiring the estate, naturally maintains the environment at 61ºF and 89 percent humidity. Following the aging period, the final blends are determined and the wines are egg white fined, if necessary, and membrane filtered prior to bottling. Conde de la Salceda is bottled unfiltered. Production averages 190,000 cases per vintage in all three wines.

In 2001, Chivite purchased a 150 acre estate in La Horra, in the heart of the Ribera del Duero region. The estate was first planted to vines in 1999 and now has 120 acres in Tempranillo with the balance in Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. The 2004 vintage was its first; the 2005 wines are scheduled to be released in 2008. An estate cellar in the planning stages will anticipate potential volume of approximately 22,000 cases.