Planning a family business succession is often fraught, especially when the business is as big as David Álvarez’s multinational, Grupo Eulen, and when seven heirs are involved and when the founder is used to ruling like a king. “He wasn’t a dictator, but he was very domineering,” says Mr. García, the former Vega Sicilia winemaker, of David Álvarez. “I remember that in meetings no one spoke. No one. One day it occurred to me to point out a subtle difference, and he didn’t stop talking.”

Ousted by His Children

The Álvarez family problems began around the time of the patriarch’s third wedding, in late 2009. David Álvarez had been passing management responsibilities to his children for several years, and his fifth child, Juan Carlos, was running the big company, Eulen, with his father serving as executive chairman. Under Juan Carlos, Pablo says, Eulen achieved “the best results in the company’s history.”

But the coming rift would become fodder for Spanish newspapers. Among other things, Spanish papers said David Álvarez’s wedding was tense because the children were displeased that their father was marrying one of his secretaries — the second time he had married one — and that his new bride, now 61, was younger than the oldest of David’s children. And newspaper reports said tempers exploded when Juan Carlos dismissed one of his father’s trusted confidants while the patriarch and his new bride were on their honeymoon.

Image The El País website covered the Álvarez family saga, showing family members in happier times in 2005; Pablo Álvarez stood behind his father, David. Credit... elpais.com

Pablo Álvarez, who confirms that Juan Carlos dismissed the confidant, waves off the story of a honeymoon timing of the dismissal as fiction and says he doesn’t know who originated the tale. But Pablo says it was his father who took the family feud to the media. Either way, he says, the family fracture was a long time in coming and was not caused by the dismissal. (The press office at Eulen declined to comment on the specific origins of the feud, except to say that Juan Carlos had “betrayed” his father’s trust; Juan Carlos declined to comment.)

What is not in dispute is that soon after the wedding, David Álvarez used his majority ownership at Eulen to force out Juan Carlos and take over management with María José and Jesus David, the two children who still supported him.

In Pablo’s telling, his father, suffering the wobbliness of age, yearned to return to his days of glory. “I believe this is a process that happens in many older people, where after leaving the executive role they want to return to it,” he says. “The loss of capacity makes them want to again control what they can no longer control.”