Three siblings, a brother-in-law and a port city.

Licor 43 comes from Cartagena, the port city in the Region of Murcia in south-east Spain. Spanish Wikipedia dates the liqueur to 1946 and names its founders as the brothers Diego and Ángel Zamora and their brother-in-law Emilio Restoy; English Wikipedia and the company also name their sister Josefina Zamora, Restoy’s wife. Zamora Company, the family group that still owns the brand, says Diego Zamora was its first chairman, and the brand’s own history page said in 2019 that the family “started to bottle the liqueur themselves.”

The company tells its origin through a legend. It says the recipe was inspired by Liqvor Mirabilis, a “marvellous liquid” made from local fruits and herbs in Carthago Nova, the Roman name for Cartagena, which it says the Romans banned and the Carthaginians went on making in secret. That story is the company’s own telling.

The name is a count. Spanish Wikipedia and the company both say “43” refers to the number of ingredients. The company says the recipe is a family secret handed down through the generations, and names among its notes Mediterranean citrus, coriander and vanilla. The original liqueur is bottled at 31% alcohol by volume, the company says.

The group grew around the liqueur. Zamora Company says that in the 1950s and 1960s, with Diego Zamora in charge, “creative marketing campaigns” built the brand in Spain; that it began selling into Europe and the Americas from the 1970s; and that in 1999, with Emilio Restoy as chairman, it added the winery Ramón Bilbao. In 2017 the business, earlier called the Diego Zamora group, adopted the name Zamora Company and a new corporate identity; it says the second and third generations of the family now run it.

Pilé 43, a yacht and a new bottle.

Advertising is central to the brand’s own account of itself. Its history page said in 2019 that the company invested in graphic and audiovisual media while Spain’s advertising industry “was still emerging,” and that tourists who discovered the liqueur on holiday spread the word when they went home. In the 1970s, it says, its advertising turned to colour and “modernity,” selling the liqueur over crushed ice as a long drink, Pilé 43, in campaigns it describes as blurring the line between advertising and pop art.

Sponsorship followed. Spanish Wikipedia records that Licor 43 sponsored a professional cycling team and a yacht in the 1981–82 Whitbread Round the World Race; the company says the yacht was built for the race and sailed with a Spanish crew.

The bottle has changed too. The company says it unified its global image under the line “Pura Pasión” at the same time as it redesigned the bottle. The range has widened: the company launched Licor 43 Orochata, inspired by Spain’s horchata, presenting it as the first new sibling after 70 years of the original, and today lists flavours including Chocolate, Crème Brûlée and Caramel Cookie.

Production has stayed in Cartagena. In October 2012 the Murcia newspaper La Verdad reported that the company had moved all its production out of its factory in the city’s San Antón district, where lorries had caused daily traffic jams, to a new 27,311-square-metre site beside the Los Camachos industrial estate, on the motorway leaving Cartagena toward Alicante. The paper reported that the new plant would take capacity from about four million to eight million litres of liqueur a year across Licor 43 and the group’s other liqueur brands.

The company’s website says all its liqueurs are made “in a restricted area at our site in Cartagena,” and describes six steps: selecting the ingredients, macerating them in water and alcohol, blending, resting the liqueur in stainless-steel tanks for six to nine months, chilling it at about −5 °C for five days, and micro-filtering it.

Spirit brands and the families behind them.

The seven brands in this group are all spirit names from Mexico, France, Greece and Spain: José Cuervo, Patrón, Ricard, Pernod, Metaxa, Ouzo 12 and Licor 43. Spirit brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood bar to a duty-free shelf.

A spirit brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the drink or ritual 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 spirits are 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 spirits are made and how its bottles and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family recipe carried abroad.

Licor 43 is sold far beyond Spain. Drinks International reported in March 2012 that it had passed 500,000 cases a year, with about 70% of sales in Europe and more than 23% in the United States and the Caribbean; Germany was its largest European market, and the company said it was present in more than 55 markets. In July 2018 the same magazine reported, citing the market-research firm IWSR, that the brand sold 750,000 cases in 2017, and that the “100% family-owned” Zamora Company was ending its partnership with W. J. Deutsch, which had imported Licor 43 into the United States, to take “independent control” of the brand there. Zamora Company says it set up its own US business in 2019. Spanish Wikipedia puts the brand in more than 70 countries.

The liqueur has also found a place in coffee. Spanish Wikipedia notes its use in the barraquito of the Canary Islands and the asiático of the Cartagena area, both layered coffees, and English Wikipedia notes its use in the Mexican carajillo, poured with espresso over ice.

The group around it has grown well beyond one liqueur. Zamora Company says it added five brands in 2018, among them Martin Miller’s gin and Villa Massa limoncello, and lists production sites in Spain, Italy, Britain and the United States, with Licor 43 at Cartagena.

For a design guide, Licor 43 shows how a number can work as a brand name, carrying a family recipe from one Spanish port to drinkers abroad. Compare Estrella Damm, another Spanish drinks name, and Unicum, the Zwack family’s Budapest bitter. For this guide we use liqueur gold, a harbour navy and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Licor 43’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.