Surveying ten exceptional bottles, this story explains how rarity in gin comes from ingredients, provenance and production scale. It profiles ultra-limited European releases like Morus LXIV and Watenshi alongside innovative Indian labels such as Hapusa, Stranger & Sons and Terai, arguing that India’s new craft distillers now stand shoulder to shoulder with long-established gin powerhouses.
Gin does not age the way whisky does. Once distilled, it needs only a few weeks to rest before bottling, which means everything that makes a gin rare has to be present in the making of it—the botanicals, the source material, the scale of production. India is now producing gins that sit comfortably in this conversation: grain-to-glass operations from distillers who have been in the spirits business for four generations before they ever made gin, Himalayan juniper alongside tulsi and gondhoraj lime, and bottles winning medals at San Francisco and London alongside the European names that have been doing this for centuries.
In the list below, the five Indian bottles are on local shelves. Whereas, the international ones are best acquired at duty-free counters or through specialist retailers abroad—Indian customs duty on imported spirits runs well above 150 per cent, and landed prices climb accordingly.
The claim on this one is specific enough to either be true or be the best marketing in gin: Morus LXIV is distilled entirely from the leaves of a single 100-year-old mulberry tree, each batch taking over two years to produce, bottled at 64 per cent ABV. The result is a smoky sweetness layered with intense juniper and citrus zest—a profile that tastes like nothing else in the category, which is the point. It arrives in a handmade porcelain jar with a matching stirring cup and hand-embossed leather casing, making the bottle as much a collector's object as the spirit inside it.
Price: It retails at approximately £4,000 (approx. Rs. 4,30,000) per bottle, before Indian import duty.
Watenshi means angel's share in Japanese—the portion of spirit that evaporates during distillation and is otherwise lost to the air above the cask. Cambridge Distillery built a process to capture this fraction instead of accepting the loss, yielding just 15ml of spirit per full distillation run—less than a single shot. Only six bottles are produced per run, each presented in hand-blown glass decorated with silver. The name is accurate in a way that most gin names are not.
Price: It retails at approximately USD 2,700 – USD 3,500 (approx. Rs. 2,25,000 – Rs. 2,92,000) per bottle, before Indian import duty.
The Nolet family has been distilling in Schiedam, Holland, since 1691—the same house that makes Ketel One vodka, now in its 11th generation. The Reserve is the personal creation of Carolus Nolet Sr., the 10th-generation owner, and it is built around warm saffron and delicate verbena. Saffron costs approximately USD 8 per gram, which gives some indication of what goes into making this bottle economically possible. Every batch is personally approved by Nolet before release, and every bottle is hand-numbered.
Price: It retails at approximately USD 700 – USD 1,200 (approx. Rs. 58,000–Rs. 1,00,000) per bottle, before Indian import duty.
The origin story behind Monkey 47 involves a retired RAF Wing Commander who settled in Germany's Black Forest after the Second World War and began making gin from the forest around him—47 botanicals, foraged locally, in a recipe that has not changed since the distillery was commercially established. Each year, the Distiller's Cut adds one further rare botanical to the base, macerates it into the recipe, re-distils the whole thing, and matures it for three months in earthenware containers before bottling. No two years produce the same gin, which is precisely what makes each vintage worth keeping.
Price: It retails at approximately USD 250 – USD 500 (approx. Rs. 26,000 – Rs. 41,000) per bottle, before Indian import duty.
The Nordic Food Lab is a research organisation that has spent years investigating the culinary potential of insects. Anty Gin is the result of its collaboration with Cambridge Distillery: a gin built around the essence of 62 wood ants, hand-foraged from British woodland, combined with juniper, wild wood avens, and nettle. The ants contribute a naturally citrus-like flavour—formic acid, present in ant bodies, reads on the palate as a clean bright acidity. It is the most discussed entry in the rare gin category, less for the price than for what it asks the drinker to accept.
Price: It retails at approximately £200 (approx. Rs. 21,000) per bottle, before Indian import duty.
Radico Khaitan has been distilling spirits in India since 1943, and the Rampur distillery in the Himalayan foothills is where Jaisalmer is made—triple-distilled in copper pot stills with 11 botanicals, seven of them Indian: Darjeeling green tea, lemongrass, coriander, vetiver, lemon peel, lime peel, and saffron. Its presence in international rare gin rankings alongside bottles costing several thousand pounds is a specific signal of how quickly the category's centre of gravity has shifted.
Price: In India, it retails at approximately Rs. 2,300 – Rs. 2,600 for a 750ml bottle.
Hapusa is Sanskrit for juniper, and the botanical comes from altitudes of 3,500 metres in the Himalayas—which is where the gin's identity begins and builds outward rather than inward. Produced by Nao Spirits in Delhi, it is not a London Dry with Indian botanicals as a garnish: it is a gin that starts from a wholly Indian botanical premise, combining Himalayan juniper with raw mango, turmeric, gondhoraj lime, cardamom, and coriander, distilled in a copper pot still. It has won medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition and the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
Price: In India, it retails at approximately Rs. 2,120 – Rs. 3,800 for a 750ml bottle, varying by state.
Third Eye Distillery in Goa launched Stranger and Sons in 2018, and it has since been exported to over 20 countries and won medals at the International Wine and Spirits Competition, the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and the Gin Masters. Nine botanicals at 42.8 per cent ABV—black pepper, coriander, liquorice root, nutmeg, cassia bark, sweet orange peel, grapefruit peel, angelica root, and juniper—with the pepper and citrus doing more of the character work than the juniper does. It is the most bartender-facing Indian gin on this list, which is both a description and a form of praise.
Price: In India, it retails at approximately Rs. 2,400 – Rs. 2,800 for a 750ml bottle.
Shekhar Swarup is a fourth-generation distiller—his family has been in Indian spirits since 1958—and Terai is the first gin he has made, at a boutique single-gin distillery in Behror, Rajasthan, on a custom-made Carl copper pot still. The base spirit is a rice grain distillate from the adjoining family distillery, a grain-to-glass provenance that no other Indian gin currently replicates in quite the same way. Eleven botanicals, most sourced from Khari Baoli in Delhi—Asia's largest spice market—including tulsi, fennel, coriander, lavender, rose, lemon peel, orange peel, almond, angelica root, orris root, and juniper. The stopper on every bottle is hand-carved by artisans from Channapatna, Karnataka, in natural wood coloured with vegetable dye, and a limited run of 700 bottles with a purple stopper was released with proceeds directed to Khoj International Artists' Association.
Price: In India, it retails at approximately Rs. 2,500 – Rs. 3,500 for a 750ml bottle.
Nao Spirits (the Delhi company also behind Hapusa), built Greater Than around a different proposition: not what Indian botanicals can do to gin, but what Indian distilling can do with the classic London Dry form. Juniper-forward, clean, and structured, with nine botanicals including coriander, angelica root, lemon peel, cubeb berries, grains of paradise, and orris root, distilled in a 500-litre copper pot still, it has won Double Gold at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. It is the gin that most serious Indian bartenders reach for when they want a domestic alternative to the classic European dry style—a sentence that, five years ago, would not have been possible to write.
Price: In India, it retails at approximately Rs. 1,450 – Rs. 2,000 for a 750ml bottle.