India’s gin revolution has transformed bar shelves, with experimentation shifting from whisky to premium gins. This guide spotlights six standout international bottles now widely available in India—Monkey 47, 44°N, The Botanist, Oxley, Hendrick’s and Gin Mare—explaining their origins, botanicals, flavour profiles, ideal serves and price bands so drinkers can spend wisely on genuinely crafted spirits.
Ask a bartender in Mumbai or Bengaluru what changed in the last five years, and gin comes up before anything else. Whisky still rules the volume charts, but gin is where the actual experimentation is happening, importers are betting on stranger, harder-to-place bottles, and drinkers are buying them.
What used to mean a choice between two or three international names now means shelves stocked with bottles distilled in the Black Forest, foraged on a Scottish island, and cold-processed in a London lab.
Not everything with a fancy label is worth the money, though. Some of it is packaging dressed up as craft. The six gins below have earned their price tags the old-fashioned way, through method, sourcing, and the kind of obsessive detail that actually changes what's in the glass. Here's what to know before you spend on any of them.
The name comes from Montgomery Collins, a British officer who reportedly fell for the Black Forest after the war and stayed on to run a zoo, monkeys included. Decades later, a small German distillery borrowed his nickname for a gin built on 47 separate botanicals, among them lingonberries picked from the surrounding forest. That number sounds like a gimmick until you actually taste it: the gin keeps unfolding for a good ten minutes after you pour it, moving from juniper to citrus peel to something almost medicinal and back again. Drink it neat first before you decide it needs a mixer.
Price: ₹6,500 – ₹9,000
Made in: Black Forest, Germany
Best suited to: Sipping neat, or a bone-dry Martini
Named for the latitude that runs through the French Riviera, this one is made near Chateau Leoube, a vineyard estate along the Cote d Azur, and it tastes like the address. Lemon and grapefruit peel do the early work, but mimosa flower and chamomile pull it somewhere softer and more floral than a typical citrus-led gin. It's the rare bottle that actually earns the word summery, pour it over ice with a good tonic and a twist of grapefruit and it barely needs anything else.
Price: ₹5,500 – ₹7,000
Made in: Cote d Azur, France
Best suited to: Long drinks with tonic on a hot evening
Bruichladdich, the distillery behind this one, sits on Islay, an island better known for smoky whisky than gin. The Botanist is made using a Lomond still nicknamed Ugly Betty, and alongside the standard nine gin botanicals, it uses 22 more that are hand-foraged from the island itself: wild thyme, mint, heather, gorse flower. The result reads more herbal garden than juniper bomb, and it rewards patience, this is not a gin to rush through in a highball.
Price: ₹5,000 – ₹6,500
Made in: Islay, Scotland
Best suited to: Slow sipping, light on the mixer
Most gins are distilled with heat, which is efficient but tends to cook off the more delicate aromatics. Oxley's makers went the opposite way, building a vacuum still that distills at close to freezing, so the citrus and floral botanicals never get exposed to heat at all. Some ingredients go in whole, others are macerated separately before blending, a slower, fussier process, but it shows in the glass. The finish is unusually clean, with a faint vanilla sweetness that lingers just long enough to notice.
Price: ₹4,800 – ₹6,000
Made in: London, England
Best suited to: A classic, well-built Martini
Depending on who you ask, Hendrick's either started the modern gin boom or just arrived at exactly the right moment. Either way, master distiller Lesley Gracie's original 1999 recipe, cucumber and rose petal folded into a fairly traditional juniper base, is still the gin most people picture when someone says premium gin. It's not the most complex bottle on this list, but it's the most dependable, and there's a reason bartenders reach for it first when building anything from a Martini to a simple gin and soda.
Price: ₹4,500 – ₹5,500
Made in: Girvan, Scotland
Best suited to: Almost anything, genuinely all-purpose
Made on the Catalan coast, Gin Mare skips the citrus-heavy formula most gins default to and leans hard into the Mediterranean pantry instead: arbequina olives, rosemary, thyme, basil. Each botanical is distilled separately before blending, which keeps the savoury elements distinct rather than muddy. It smells more like a herb garden than a cocktail, and it's genuinely divisive, people either love it or find it too far from what a gin should taste like. Worth trying before committing to a full bottle.
Price: ₹4,500 – ₹5,500
Made in: Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain
Best suited to: A Martini with olive brine, or tonic with a rosemary sprig
Note: Prices above reflect typical retail ranges in India and will vary by state, taxes, and retailer.