The gin wave was a very real phenomenon, but the big problem with waves is that they tend to come crashing to a dramatic finish.
And that's what we're seeing with gin.
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For a few years there, it was a seemingly unstoppable force. You didn't even count as a city worth visiting unless you had at least five specialist gin bars, and the world of exotic plant – and animal – ingredients was pillaged to invent ever-more ridiculous gin flavorings (oyster and kelp, anyone? Ants? Brussels sprouts?).
Of course, such excess is usually a sign that an empire is starting to go a bit runny; it happened to the Romans, and it's happening to gin.
Gin has plateaued: global volume rose 1 percent in 2025 to about 109 million cases, and IWSR expects roughly similar annual growth to 2029. The ultra-premium tier and mainstream gin in the Philippines, Africa and India are growing. Standard and mid-premium gin, flavored gin, and the boom-era markets of the UK, Spain, Germany and the US are shrinking.
By comparison, the so-called "prestige and ultra-premium" segment (where do they get these ridiculous names?) of the market has grown 42 percent since 2022, albeit from a small base. Elsewhere, growth is harder to come by, with overall expansion of the gin market slowing rapidly from 4 percent growth in 2023 to last year's 1 percent.
Where growth is happening is interesting: the Philippines, Nigeria and the US are now the three largest markets by volume, with India and China the fastest growing markets. The traditional home of gin – the UK – has fallen 40 percent from its peak in around 2019, when it accounted for 22 percent of all spirit sales.
But quality will out, as they say, and it's the top end of the market we are concerned with for these "Best of" stories, so let's forget the bad news and revel in the luxury of the finest gins currently known to humanity.
How do we come up with our list? Well, since we follow the world's most respected critics across wine and spirits, we take a simple step of aggregating those critic scores and coming up with our own Wine-Searcher score.
In the past we've simply listed the top 10 best bottles in our spirits category in order of score, regardless of how many critics have rated them. This year, we are operating a hybrid model, whereby the gin rankings are based on a minimum of two separate scores.
There's a bit to digest in that list, but the first thing to emphasize is that there are no gimmicky flavors among the top 10 – instead these gins are all juniper-led and united by a level of smoothness and balance unlikely to be enhanced by the addition of, say, parmesan and capers.
It's also instructive to see where the gins actually come from. Notwithstanding the falling away of gin's popularity in Europe, six of these come from England, two from Scotland and one each from Germany and Ireland. This is interesting, because Wine-Searcher search data shows that Indian gins are now among the most searched-for, while British gin dominates the offers, or what is actually available on retailer's shelves. And, of course, Britain also dominates the best gins list.
The big prize, however, is neither India nor the UK, rather it is the vast American market. While the premium gin market is contracting there, the very top end is growing – particularly in bars and restaurants – offering hope to producers elsewhere. Also, the growing thirst for gin in India will get distillers' hearts racing, particularly as that potentially mammoth market is also growing in terms of value.
And maybe that's the other thing to remember about waves: they might crash to the shore, but they also keep on coming.
