Two marketers and a gin for a city.

Ginraw is a gin from Barcelona, and its founders came from marketing rather than distilling. The English-language city magazine Barcelona Metropolitan reported in February 2017 that Lluís Jáuregui and his business partner Roger Burgués set up a company, Mediterranean Premium Spirits, in 2013 to create Ginraw, which the magazine described as a luxury “gastronomic” gin meant for the bars of Michelin-starred restaurants. It added that the gin had been warmly received in the city’s leading restaurants and hotels. The brand’s website was online by November 2014, when the Internet Archive first saved it with pages in Catalan, Spanish and English.

The founders’ careers are set out by Vintus, the brand’s importer in the United States. It says Burgués, who has a law degree and an MBA, spent six years at Bacardi in local and international roles managing premium spirits brands, and that Jáuregui, an economist, was marketing and communication director at the Richemont group’s Montblanc for six years. The brand writes its own name in capitals, as GINRAW, and sums up its approach in two words of English: “Madness for perfection.”

Ginraw says the idea began with a recurring question: whether a gin could meet the expectations of high gastronomy, and whether a gin could carry the fragrance and essence of a city. Its answer, the company says, was to bring together four specialists from the world of food and drink — a chef, a sommelier, a mixologist and a master perfumer — and ask them to make a superior craft spirit.

A chef, a sommelier, a mixologist and a perfumer.

The company names the four. Xano Saguer is the chef, described as a founding partner of Espai Sucre, the Barcelona dessert restaurant and pastry school. Sergi Figueras is the sommelier. Javier Caballero, the mixologist, is described as the founder and director of Liquid Experience. Rosendo Mateu, the master perfumer, trained in Geneva and Paris and has spent four decades creating perfumes, the brand says. Vintus adds a fifth name, the master distiller Montse Mascaró, whom it describes as the third generation of a respected Spanish distilling family.

The method is the centre of the brand’s story. Ginraw says it distils its botanicals at low temperature in a Rotaval, a rotary evaporator it describes as a tool developed by haute cuisine, in order to keep the aromas and freshness of the ingredients; the importer says this is combined with traditional single-batch distillation in a copper still. The brand lists three fresh notes — lemon, cedrat and bay leaf — and three more distant spices and leaves: kaffir lime leaves, black cardamom and coriander seed. These essences are blended in proportion with a juniper distillate, it says, to give the gin its character. A 2025 article by the British retailer Drink Finder gives the origins as lemon peel from Murcia, cedrat from Valencia, kaffir lime from Thailand, black cardamom from India and coriander from Egypt, with the juniper distilled in a copper pot still and the other botanicals each distilled on their own.

The gin is made outside the city. Barcelona Metropolitan reported in 2017 that production was based in Vilafranca del Penedès, in the wine country west of Barcelona.

The range has since grown beyond the original. The brand’s website now lists flavoured gins called Flor de Cerezo (cherry blossom), Lavanda (lavender) and Flor de Azahar (orange blossom), which it describes as using wild botanicals with a distinctive aromatic profile.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Spanish gins: Nordés, Xoriguer, Puerto de Indias, Larios, Gin Raw, Le Tribute and Santamanía. They come from different corners of the country, from Galicia and the Balearic Islands to Andalusia, Catalonia and Madrid, and they sit at different points in the trade, from family distilleries and small independent producers to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups.

A gin brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a bottle, a label and the place it names, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its distilling or grown far beyond the town where it began. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its gin is actually distilled and bottled.

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

Architectural glass, wood, leather and a single colour.

Ginraw’s bottle was designed by SeriesNemo, a Barcelona studio, according to Packaging of the World, which published the project in February 2017. The studio’s description calls it a bottle “of almost architectural forms” meant to catch the urban and cosmopolitan spirit of Barcelona. The glass moves from a frosted to a translucent finish, which the designers say conveys the gin’s freshness and purity; wood and leather are used as noble materials to bring the warmth and tradition of the Barcelona lifestyle; and a single colour, ochre, is meant to evoke the Mediterranean sun and the welcoming character of the city’s people. Each bottle is numbered, which the description presents as the guarantee of a limited production. Drink Finder describes the stopper as topped with ash wood.

The studio’s text ties the bottle to the liquid. It presents low-temperature distillation as one of the most avant-garde culinary techniques, says the final finish with fresh botanicals keeps their aromas intact, and closes by calling GINRAW “a rare gin, made with care and passion.” Vintus, in turn, sells it as a “super-premium gastronomic gin from Barcelona” and a collaboration between “four masters of their craft.”

The same studio is credited by Dieline with the naming and design of LE Tribute, the gin launched in 2016 by Destilerías MG of Vilanova i la Geltrú, so two Catalan gin bottles of the same years came from one Barcelona studio.

For a design guide, Ginraw shows how one colour and two materials can carry a brand: an ochre accent, frosted glass, wood and leather. Compare Gin Mare, another Mediterranean gin from Catalonia, and LE Tribute. For this guide we use ochre, frosted white, ash and leather brown with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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