How gin came to Mahón, and how the Pons family came to make it.

Gin on Menorca is older than any brand. The technical file for the Gin de Mahón geographical indication, sent to the European Commission in February 2018, traces the drink to the years when Britain ruled the island, between 1712 and 1802. British soldiers and residents could not find the spirit that was fashionable at home, the file says, so the merchants of Mahón began trading in juniper berries and Mediterranean alcohols and local craftsmen built stills. The file cites a recipe book from about 1790 to 1810 as the first written reference to the gin, and notes that the Menorcan writer Joan Ramis i Ramis mentioned it in 1815. It also points to an 1889 manuscript listing the island’s spirits that includes “Gin de Mahón de pota o de la terra” with the note “since ancient times,” and to an 1895 recipe book from Furneru, which the file calls one of the most prestigious distilleries in Mahón. Because the gin left the island through the port of Mahón, it became known abroad as Gin de Mahón.

Xoriguer belongs to that tradition. According to the same technical file, Miguel Pons Justo founded the Xoriguer distillery at the beginning of the twentieth century, giving “a definitive boost” to the sale of Gin de Mahón in Spain and abroad, and the distillery is still in operation. The company itself dates its story to 1945. Xoriguer says Miguel Pons Justo set out to revive an old gin recipe after a fire destroyed the distillery where he worked; that in 1945 he took his barrels of gin to Ciutadella for the Festes de Sant Joan, where it was well received; and that he then set up in the port of Mahón, where the distillery still stands. The applicant named in the geographical-indication file is the family company Miguel Pons Justo, S.A., and Xoriguer describes itself as a family distillery.

A windmill on the label and a flask from the island’s past.

The brand’s name and its main image come from the same place. Xoriguer says its label honours the Xoriguer windmill, where the founder’s family lived and worked, and that the design stands for tradition, quality and care. The company presents the gin in a green bottle with a handle.

That bottle has a long local history behind it. The Gin de Mahón technical file says one of the drink’s original characteristics is the ceramic bottle it was sold in. The Museum of Menorca in Mahón holds examples from the period of British rule, some of them dredged from the harbour, and the file notes that the custom of selling Gin de Mahón in bottles similar to the old ceramic ones continues today, alongside other containers.

The gin is also tied to the island’s festivals. The technical file describes pomada, Gin de Mahón mixed with lemonade, as a drink strongly associated with the patron-saint festivals of Sant Joan and the Mare de Déu de Gràcia, and lists other island mixes such as pellofa, gin with soda, which turns into a fil ferro with the local palo liqueur, a verdet with herb liqueur and a saliveta with an olive. Xoriguer sells a ready-mixed pomada made with its gin and lemonade, along with a range of liqueurs, and its product listings carry the line “Crafted in Menorca.”

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.

A family distillery and a protected name.

Xoriguer is made under the rules of the Gin de Mahón indication. The technical file limits production to the island of Menorca and requires agricultural alcohol containing at least 10 per cent wine alcohol, juniper berries dried for at least a year and macerated for at least ten hours, and a single distillation in copper stills heated directly over a wood fire, with only the heart of the run kept. The distillate is traditionally collected in jugs, so that the master distiller can control the run by timing how long each one takes to fill, and production is limited to one distillation a day. The finished gin must be between 38 and 43 per cent alcohol.

The name has been protected in stages. Spanish Wikipedia says the Consell Insular de Menorca granted a geographical designation in 1997, that a ministerial order recognised the name “Gin de Mahón” in November 2010, and that the indication was recognised under the Lisbon System of the World Intellectual Property Organization on 22 June 2021. Xoriguer, through Miguel Pons Justo, S.A., was the applicant on the 2018 technical file.

Today the company offers guided tours of the distillery in the port of Mahón, where, it says, visitors can see the gin distilled in copper pot stills heated with wood, and it exports to countries including the United States, Italy, Japan and Hong Kong. For a design guide, Xoriguer shows how a local object — a handled flask and a family windmill — can carry a brand for generations. Compare it with Nordés, the Galician gin whose bottle draws on traditional ceramics, and with Gin Mare, a Mediterranean gin from the Catalan coast. For this guide we use bottle green, copper and windmill stone with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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