A sixteenth-century document, a marriage and a first cava.

Codorníu dates itself to 1551. Catalan Wikipedia, citing a 2013 profile in the business magazine Capital, says a document of that year in the name of Jaume Codorníu shows the family already in the wine trade in Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, in the Penedès west of Barcelona; English Wikipedia adds that the document lists the presses and tools of a working winery. On that reckoning Codorníu is among the oldest companies in Spain.

The family name changed in the seventeenth century. In 1659, Catalan and English Wikipedia say, Anna Codorníu, the heiress of the Can Codorníu farmhouse and the last to carry the surname, married the grower Miquel Raventós. From then on the estate passed down the Raventós line, which ran the house for more than three centuries while keeping the Codorníu name on the bottles.

The turn to sparkling wine came in the nineteenth century. Catalan Wikipedia says that in 1872, after a journey to Champagne, Josep Raventós i Fatjó began making sparkling wine by the traditional method of second fermentation in the bottle, and that the house soon led the Spanish market for what would later be sold as cava. Spanish Wikipedia says his son Manuel Raventós later decided the cellars would make only cava and travelled to France to study winemaking.

The family also went inland. Spanish Wikipedia says that in 1914 Manuel Raventós bought about 3,200 hectares of dry land in Lleida that became the Raimat estate, now the second pillar of the group. Later came the Rondel cava cellar in 1949, the purchase of Bach in the Penedès in 1975 and of Bodegas Bilbaínas in Haro, in Rioja, the Artesa winery in California’s Napa Valley in 1998 and Séptima in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1999.

A cathedral of cava and a name worn on the label.

Codorníu’s most important design object is a building. Manuel Raventós commissioned the cellars at Sant Sadurní from Josep Puig i Cadafalch, one of the leading architects of Catalan modernisme. English and Catalan Wikipedia date the work to 1895–1915, while Spanish Wikipedia dates Puig i Cadafalch’s renovation to 1902–1915. Catalan Wikipedia says the house was then making about 100,000 bottles a year, so the scale of the buildings, and their distance from the railway, seemed out of proportion at the time; English Wikipedia says Raventós wanted the winery beside the vineyards. Tourism and university sources often call the complex the “Cathedral of Cava”, and the architect Lluís Bonet i Garí later added to it.

In 1976 the cellars were declared a national historic and artistic monument, a status the company says was granted by decree of King Juan Carlos I. The house has also looked after the visual record of its own history: in October 2014, the Generalitat de Catalunya reported, Codorníu lent the regional archive of the Alt Penedès a collection of some 700 glass plates and early film negatives tracing the winery and the replanting of the Penedès after phylloxera.

The family name is part of the product line as well. Anna de Codorníu, named after the last Codorníu, is described by Catalan Wikipedia as the first cava to include Chardonnay alongside the three traditional Penedès grapes. Its label has drawn on the cellars too: Packaging of the World showed in February 2025 a redesign by the Valencia studio Lavernia & Cienfuegos for Viñas de Anna, a wine first released by Codorníu in 2015, which takes its cues from Puig i Cadafalch’s architecture.

The main Codorníu labels were redrawn in 2024. The Brazilian trade site ABC da Comunicação reported in March 2024 that the Spanish designer Salvatore Adduci had given the labels a new visual identity, setting the “C” of Codorníu more prominently to stress quality and the house’s long history.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all European wine names: Mateus, Lancers, Blue Nun, Black Tower, Freixenet, Codorníu and Campo Viejo. European wine brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A wine brand’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, moved its production 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 company 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 company’s own word.

From a family winery to a private-equity-owned group.

The family era ended in 2018. El Confidencial reported in June 2018 that the Raventós family shareholders had agreed to sell a majority of the group to the American investment firm The Carlyle Group, and Catalan Wikipedia says the group passed to Carlyle in November 2018; the stake has been reported at between 60 and 68 per cent, with members of the family keeping the rest. Maria del Mar Raventós, who had chaired the group since 1998, left the role in 2018, Nació Digital reported. In March 2019 the group renamed itself Raventós Codorníu.

Its registered seat had already moved. In October 2017, during the Catalan independence process, Codorníu transferred its registered office from Catalonia to Haro in La Rioja, the news agency EFE reported, while its staff and cellars stayed in Catalonia.

Carlyle has since prepared to leave. The Drinks Business and Catalan News reported in June 2025 that it had hired Morgan Stanley and Banco Santander to sell its stake, and Ara reported in September 2026 that the group, led by chief executive Sergio Fuster, was still looking for a buyer while reporting record sales. Alimarket reported the same month that Raventós Codorníu was selling Artesa, its Napa winery, to Jean-Charles Boisset of the Boisset Collection, after selling the Masía Bach winery in late 2025, and that the group says it sells about 55 million bottles a year in 63 countries.

The name needs a little care online. Codorniu is also a Spanish surname, and Raventós i Blanc is a separate winery. The house’s own site is codorniu.com, and the group’s is raventoscodorniu.com.

For a design guide, Codorníu shows how a family name, a single initial and a modernista building can carry a wine house dated to 1551 into the present day. Compare Freixenet, its neighbour in Sant Sadurní, and Estrella Damm, the Barcelona lager. For this guide we use cellar brick, cava straw and limestone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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