A family distillery on the coast south-west of Barcelona.

LE Tribute is made by Destilerías MG, also written MG Destilerías, the Giró family’s distillery in Vilanova i la Geltrú, a coastal town in the province of Barcelona. Forbes España reported in 2019 that the company began in 1835 on the town’s main rambla, making syrups and horchatas, then turned to aguardientes and liqueurs in 1880 and to soda siphons in 1923. In the 1960s it moved to new premises on the road to Cubelles, and in 1965 it began making whisky under the MAG name, the magazine reported.

Gin arrived in 1940. According to Forbes España and the design magazine Neo2, Manuel Giró, who took over from his father Pedro, created Gin MG that year; the initials are his. Neo2 described the family as being in its fifth generation in 2017, when Gin MG was given a new bottle and label: the magazine reported a cleaner, more transparent and more stylised bottle, with the strength raised from 37.5 back to its original 40 degrees.

The distillery is also the home of Gin Mare. Shanken News Daily reported in September 2022 that Brown-Forman had agreed to buy Gin Mare from Vantguard and MG Destilerías — the brand had been founded by the Giró family with Alfonso Morodo and Antonio Pardo of Vantguard — and that Gin Mare would continue to be produced at MG Destilerías in Vilanova i la Geltrú. The Spirits Business named Manu Giró as chief executive of Destilerías MG in 2024, and the wine and spirits site Vinetur reported in November 2025 that the Giró family remained involved in the daily running of the business.

Seven distillations, a citrus gin and a family of mixers.

LE Tribute was launched in 2016, according to the company and to Vinetur. The Greek drinks site Bitterbooze, reviewing it in April 2017, called it a project of the family’s fifth generation — Manuel Giró’s grandsons Marc and Manuel, it said — and wrote that the gin drew on the house’s long history of pharmaceutical syrups and elixirs. The company says the brand is a homage to two centuries of the distillery’s history. Its name stands for “Liquid Experience Tribute,” the brand told Dieline in 2016: “a recognition to the Pioneers, Processes and Heritage.”

The gin is built from separate distillations. Bitterbooze reported seven, each with its own botanicals — juniper; lime; kumquat; lemon with pink and green grapefruit; mandarin; cardamom with sweet and bitter orange; and lemongrass — six of them in neutral wheat and barley spirit and the lemongrass in water, before the distillates are blended and bottled at 43% abv. Because of the water distillation, the review explained, the gin cannot be called a London Dry. Vinetur lists Valencia oranges, Seville lemons, three kinds of grapefruit, kumquat, Mediterranean mandarins and lime among its citrus, with lemongrass for freshness.

The range reaches beyond gin. Dieline described LE TRIBUTE in 2016 as a line of gin, mezcal and tonic water; the company now lists gins, a mezcal and eight non-alcoholic drinks, from tonic and ginger beer to an olive lemonade. In October 2024 The Spirits Business reported a limited edition, LE Tribute Countryside Luxury Gin, built around black cardamom balanced with lavender and sage and meant to evoke summer evenings in the countryside around Vilanova i la Geltrú; Destilerías MG described it as the first of a collection of gins due in 2025 and 2026.

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.

Ridged glass, pastel tones and a copper stopper.

The bottle is the brand’s calling card. Dieline reported in June 2016 that Destilerías MG turned to the Barcelona studio SeriesNemo for LE TRIBUTE’s naming, graphic design, industrial design and communication. It described tall, sleek bottles with edges of art-deco inspiration, ridges for texture, smooth copper caps on the gin and mezcal, a traditional crown cap on the tonic water, and “dreamy pastel hues” on the spirits bottles. The brand’s own line, quoted there, was “‘Old but New’ is our essence.”

Later descriptions tie the shape to the family’s past. Bitterbooze wrote in 2017 that the bottle recalls the pharmaceutical elixirs of earlier centuries, and Vinetur in 2025 that it is inspired by old apothecary jars, in cut glass with vertical ridges and a copper stopper. The company’s tagline is “The art of crafting beauty,” or in Spanish “El arte de crear belleza,” and Vinetur reported that the brand recommends serving the gin in a balloon glass with plenty of ice, its own tonic and a thick strip of grapefruit peel. For the Countryside edition in 2024, The Spirits Business reported, the brand replaced the paper label with a zamac plate and leather accents around the neck.

SeriesNemo is also credited, by Packaging of the World in 2017, with the bottle for Ginraw, a Barcelona gin presented in frosted glass with ochre, wood and leather.

For a design guide, LE Tribute shows how a distillery’s history can become packaging: an apothecary silhouette, ridged glass, pastel tones and copper. Compare Gin Mare, produced at the same distillery, and Ginraw. For this guide we use copper, pastel rose, pastel sage and ink with an inscriptional serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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