Japanese Watenshi gin is the ‘world’s most expensive’

The UK’s Cambridge Distillery has created what it claims is the “world’s most expensive gin”.
Launching exclusively in Selfridges’ London outpost this week, the Watenshi gin comes in a hand blown glass bottle and costs an eye-watering £2000 to buy.

The company say they make the pricey spirit drop by drop with a unique distillation technique. Using air pressure less than half that found at the summit of Everest, and temperatures colder than the South Pole, they retain the finest one per cent of each distillation which would otherwise evaporate away into the atmosphere.

The Cambridge Distillery say the bottles of Watenshi are incredibly unique, because they are made of the best one percent of The Cambridge Distillery’s Japanese Gin, which itself was crowned Gin of the Year 2015 by the China & Hong Kong and Spirit Awards.

The award-winning tipple is created using Japanese botanicals such as yuzu peel, shiso leaf, sansho pepper, sesame seeds and cucumber, alongside juniper.

Each glass bottle is hand blow in Cambridgeshire, the stoppers turned in Switzerland, and the silver feathers which adorn each bottle were designed, casted, polished, engraved and plated in London. The bottles are then finished with hand-brushed Japanese characters painted by a master calligrapher.

But you’ll have to be quick if you're planning to get your hands on one. Due to its painstaking process, only 36 bottles of the pedigree gin can be produced each year, of which only six will be released to any one country.