Álvaro Domecq

Bullfighting member of a leading Spanish sherry dynasty

The epitome of old Spanish values, Álvaro Domecq, who has died aged 88, was an aristocrat and sherry magnate who devoted his life to the family estates, to bullfighting and to cultivating the personal style of an English gentleman.

"Don Álvaro", as he was known, was legendary for his exquisite "English" manners. Favouring tweed jackets and silk ties, he combined cultured elegance with the Andalusian aristocracy's main pastimes: horseriding and bullfighting.

Such was Domecq's devotion to the status quo that he fought against the republic in the Spanish civil war, and owed subsequent political posts to the General's patronage rather than democratic elections.

While, from the 1970s, Spain began to modernise around him, Domecq continued to flourish in a social and religious timewarp (he belonged to Opus Dei) as a scion of an upper-class family of French origin, which had found fortune and fame in the sherry trade in Jerez, in one of the poorest regions of Europe.

The family concern, Pedro Domecq, was for most of the last century the biggest drinks enterprise in Spain, producing brandy and sherry from the grapes grown on the chalky soil of the family's huge estates. Among other brands, Domecq owned Fundador brandy and Harvey's Bristol Cream. In 1994 the family was bought out and Pedro Domecq became part of UK-based Allied Domecq.

Álvaro Domecq's role was woven into his family's cultural and commercial tapestry from birth, though his interest in horses and bulls turned him in a slightly different direction. He was sent to Jesuit boarding schools in Madrid and Bordeaux, and then studied law. After his father's death in 1937, he became for a while managing director of the family business. He was just 20.

However, his passion was for horses, and two years earlier, he had made his debut in the bullring as a rejoneador, that is a bullfighter on horseback who carries a lance (a rejón) to fight and kill the bull.

In the 1940s, Domecq revived this almost obsolete bullfighting skill. He placed his horse in front of the bull and provoked the bull's charge. This needed nerve and outstanding control of the horse, which had to be galloped away at an angle to escape the horns. He was present at the goring and death of his close friend Manolete, the most famous bullfighter of his generation, at Linares in August 1947. Domecq himself retired from the bullring in Linares in 1949.

Domecq refused to accept money from bullfighting and donated all his fees to charity, in particular to a Catholic children's home in Jerez. To survive, bullfighting needs large estates for bulls to roam. Domecq defended his and his family's enormous privileges against the threat of land reform, which would have benefited the peasant class, by fighting on Franco's side as a pilot in the Spanish civil war from 1936 to 1939.

For five years, from 1952, he was mayor of Jerez; from 1957 to 1967 president of the Cádiz regional council; and from 1967 to 1973 a member of the Spanish parliament - payback from a dictator.

Domecq married María Josefa Romero in 1938, but 14 of their 19 children died at birth because his wife's blood group was Rhesus-negative. Of those who survived, only two lived to adulthood. Domecq leaves these two children, Álvaro and Fabiola.

· Álvaro Domecq y Díez, bullfighter and landowner, born July 1 1917; died October 5 2005