A Bilbao family, a railway quarter and a company named for the north of Spain.

The name is a description. Compañía Vinícola del Norte de España — the Wine Company of the North of Spain — was founded in 1879 in Haro, La Rioja, by the brothers Raimundo and Eusebio Real de Asúa, English and Spanish Wikipedia say; Spanish Wikipedia adds that the brothers came from Bilbao and that the oenologist Isidro Corcuera was the third founder. The company set up in Haro’s Barrio de la Estación, the quarter that grew around the town’s railway station, where it still stands beside neighbours such as La Rioja Alta and Muga.

The initials gave the company its everyday name, by accident. “A mistake — the ‘V’ was written as a ‘U’ — led to the creation of the Cune label,” Decanter noted in a 2020 tasting note. Today the company calls itself CVNE, and Cune is the name on the labels of its classic Rioja range.

The company dates its best-known names to the early twentieth century. CVNE says it launched Monopole, a white wine, in 1915, and that Viña Real and Imperial followed in 1920; it says the Imperial name came from a “Pinta Imperial” bottling made for the English market. In 1973 the company started Viñedos del Contino, a single-estate vineyard in Rioja Alavesa, and in 1994 it named a wine Real de Asúa after the founders.

The family has kept control. CVNE says the company is still controlled by the direct descendants of the founders, and Club Oenologique reported in October 2021 that Víctor Urrutia, chief executive, and his sister María Urrutia, head of marketing, are the fifth generation; Víctor took over in 2003, when his uncle retired as chairman.

A columnless cellar, a famous misprint and a label with three stars.

The best-known building at the Haro site is a barrel hall. CVNE says its cellar was designed by the studio of Gustave Eiffel, and the food magazine Directo al Paladar reported in March 2025 that the Nave Eiffel was built between 1890 and 1909. Its roof rests on metal trusses that run from wall to wall, so the hall has no interior columns and the barrels can be moved and checked without obstruction; the magazine says it is still in use for ageing the Imperial Reserva and Gran Reserva wines. The company says the hall was restored in 2007.

The house has two identities that work side by side. The company name, CVNE, sits over the business and its group of wineries, while the brand names — Cune, Imperial, Viña Real and Contino — each lead their own range. That split keeps a historic misprint in daily use: Cune began as a misreading of the company’s initials and is now one of its main labels.

Old labels are also a resource. When CVNE launched Bela, its Ribera del Duero wine, in 2019, the company said its label was a facsimile of a CVNE label from 1910 and that its three stars stood for the three children of the co-founder Eusebio Real de Asúa. The wine is named after his eldest daughter, Sofía, known as Bela, from whom the company says the fifth generation descends.

The international spotlight arrived in 2013. Shanken News Daily reported on 18 November 2013 that Wine Spectator had named Cune Imperial Gran Reserva 2004 its Wine of the Year for 2013, the top place on the magazine’s annual Top 100 list.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all wine estates from Spain, New Zealand and Germany’s Mosel: Dominio de Pingus, Álvaro Palacios, CVNE, López de Heredia, Emilio Moro, Craggy Range and Markus Molitor. Wine estates in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to larger groups, and a single estate can be known everywhere from a local wine shop to a restaurant list.

A wine estate’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, bought new vineyards or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the estate says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the estate’s own word.

From one Haro winery to a family group across Spain.

Until 2015 CVNE was a listed company. It traded on the Madrid and Bilbao stock exchanges, and in May 2015 its board proposed a tender offer to take the shares off the market, the data service TTR reported. Alimarket reported on 30 October 2015 that Spain’s securities regulator, the CNMV, had approved the offer, and that the shares not covered by it were held mainly by the Real de Asúa family, with close to two thirds, and the businessman Juan Abelló; Alimarket later confirmed that CVNE left the stock market in 2015.

The group has grown beyond Haro. CVNE says it opened a new Viña Real winery in 2004 — at Laguardia in Rioja Alavesa, its British agent Hatch Mansfield says — and built the Imperial winery inside the Haro site in 2005. The company lists a run of additions since then: the Japanese distributor Mikuni Wines in 2014, the Penedès sparkling-wine house Roger Goulart in 2017, Virgen del Galir in Valdeorras in 2018, Bela in Ribera del Duero in 2019 and the Rías Baixas winery La Val in 2023. Spanish Wikipedia adds that the company bought the Castillo de Davalillo, a castle at San Asensio in La Rioja, in 2019.

The name needs a little care online: the company writes CVNE, the labels say Cune, and both point to the same house, whose own site is cvne.com.

For a design guide, CVNE shows how a nineteenth-century company can keep its formal name for the business while letting a misprint, a royal-sounding export name and old labels carry its wines. Compare La Rioja Alta, its neighbour by the Haro station, and López de Heredia, the oldest house in the same quarter. For this guide we use Rioja garnet, antique gold and cellar black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CVNE’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.