A Galician gin built on a Galician grape.

Nordés is a gin from Galicia, in the north-west corner of Spain, and it takes its name from the weather: the brand says it is named after the wind “that heralds the arrival of fine weather in Galicia.” The trade journal Alimarket reported in February 2013 that the gin had been launched in mid-2012 by Atlantic Galician Spirits, a young company based in Poio, in the province of Pontevedra, with a delegation in Portugal. Alimarket named its founders as the sommelier Juan Avelino Torres Cannas and the winemaker Juan Luis Méndez Rojo, owner of the Vía Romana and Vinigalicia wineries. A 2022 report in Quincemil, the Galician edition of El Español, lists Pepe Albela alongside Xoan Torres and Juan Luis Méndez as the founders.

From the start the idea was to make a gin out of Galician wine. Alimarket wrote in 2013 that the product’s point of difference was a base alcohol made from the albariño grape, combined with traditional wild botanicals, and that the gin was then produced with Aguardientes de Galicia, a subsidiary of the Bardinet group.

Quincemil described the recipe in more detail in September 2022. According to that report, Nordés uses eleven botanicals — six wild Galician plants and five from overseas — and each one is macerated separately, for anything from a day to a month, before distillation. The botanical distillate is then blended with the albariño wine spirit and brought down with osmosed water to 40 per cent alcohol. Visitors to the distillery are shown aromas such as laurel, sage, lemon verbena and eucalyptus, the report said, and the gin is described as originating in San Pedro de Sarandón, near Santiago de Compostela.

A wind for a name and Galician pottery for a bottle.

Two things carry the Nordés identity: the name and the bottle. The name ties the gin to the Atlantic coast and its weather, and the brand’s own copy leans on that idea, presenting Nordés as Galicia’s premium gin and its flavours as “inspired by traditional Galician botanicals.”

The bottle does the rest of the work on the shelf. Quincemil reported in 2022 that it was designed in the colours of the Galician flag and inspired by traditional Galician ceramics. In July 2022 Alimarket reported that the bottle had been redesigned in white ceramic with a more contemporary and artisanal look, as part of a push to build Nordés as a global brand. The same report described a new communication platform called “Maxia Pura” meant to strengthen the brand at home and support its growth abroad while keeping its Galician origin at the centre. Julio Miyares Armendáriz, the brand’s global marketing manager, told Alimarket that Nordés was committed to consolidating itself as a global brand in the spirits industry.

The brand has also stretched beyond gin. Alimarket noted in 2022 that Nordesiño, a lighter aperitif drink at 9.3 per cent alcohol, had been launched in 2020. In September 2022 Quincemil reported the opening of Casa Nordés in Vedra, about twenty kilometres from Santiago de Compostela: a visitor centre with a distillation room built around a large still and a separate maceration room, where guided visits were due to go on sale from October that year.

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.

From a Galician start-up to Grupo Osborne.

Nordés did not stay independent for long. Alimarket reported in April 2018 that the founding partners of Galician Original Drinks had sold the Nordés brand to Grupo Osborne in 2015, and that Osborne was now taking a stake in Galician Original Drinks itself, in a joint project aimed at launching and backing new spirits. Francisco Conde, the Galician government’s minister for the economy, employment and industry, received the signatories before the agreement was signed, the journal said. Osborne has owned Nordés since 2015; the brand’s website names Grupo Osborne S.A. as the company behind it.

Under Osborne the gin went further afield. In February 2021 Alimarket reported that Nordés had entered the United States through Olé Imports, the importer founded by Patrick Mata and Alberto Orte, for which it was the first spirits brand, and that the gin was by then sold in some thirty countries, with Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom named as its key markets abroad. By July 2022 the journal listed the UK, Germany, Italy, Portugal, China, Brazil and the United States among the brand’s markets, and said the aim was to strengthen the brand’s position in Spain and build its presence abroad over the long term. Fernando Terry, Osborne’s chief executive, said at the time that the move was a chance to strengthen the brand’s growth at home and abroad, and in 2022 he and other Osborne executives attended the opening of Casa Nordés, Quincemil reported.

For a design guide, Nordés shows how a place — a wind, a grape and a tradition of pottery — can stand in for a logo, with a ceramic bottle doing the work a label does elsewhere. Compare it with Gin Mare, another Spanish gin built around a Mediterranean idea of place, and with Xoriguer, the Menorcan gin whose bottles recall the island’s old ceramic flasks. For this guide we use Atlantic blue, ceramic white and sea mist with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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