World Gin Awards 2025: Puntamari Wins Two Bronze Medals on the International Stage
There is a kind of international recognition you can't win with marketing campaigns or wide distribution. You earn it by pouring your spirit into a glass in front of a jury that doesn't know your name — and waiting for the verdict. In 2025, Puntamari brought Salento into that room and came out with two Bronze medals at the World Gin Awards 2025: one for its taste profile, one for the design of the bottle. An award-winning gin from Puglia on both the fronts that matter.
The World Gin Awards: the Toughest Test for a Spirit
The World Gin Awards 2025 are not a promotional showcase. They are a blind competition where samples are judged by industry professionals — bartenders, master distillers, sensory experts — without knowing the producer, the price or the origin. The gin speaks for itself, or stays silent.
For an award-winning artisanal gin made in small batches in a copper still, this is exactly the kind of test that makes sense. No category protection, no competitive advantage except what is in the glass. The WGA verdict is one of the few in the industry that turns a medal into a statement of objective quality.
The First Medal: a Taste that Tells the Story of Salento
The World Gin Awards 2025 jury assessed Puntamari on complexity, balance on the palate and length of finish. What convinced the judges was not an out-of-context exotic botanical, but the inner coherence of a profile built on the land.
Seven Mediterranean botanicals — juniper, angelica, rosehip, sweet orange, bitter orange, lemon, myrtle — distilled simultaneously in a bain-marie copper still under the guidance of Master Distiller Angelo Panegos. The gentle heat of the bain-marie doesn't burn: it caresses. It preserves the essential oils of the rosehip, enhances the balsamic depth of the myrtle and lets the trio of Salento citrus burst out on the opening without covering anything that follows. The judges praised the balance between the fresh herbaceous notes and the elegance of the citrus: a profile that Puntamari, a gin from Puglia, translates into a sense of place even before a sense of taste.
The Second Medal: Sustainable Design as an Act of Consistency
The second Bronze medal at the World Gin Awards 2025 is perhaps the one that says most about the project. It was not awarded to a graphic gimmick: it recognises a radical choice.
The Puntamari bottle is made from 100% post-consumer recycled glass. The watery tint you notice when you hold the glass up to the light is not a deliberate aesthetic effect: it is the signature of recycled material, every bottle different from the next, each one unique like a small batch of spirit. The label is printed on 100% recycled paper with natural glues. The stopper is natural cork. No plastic components. An artisanal gin from Puglia that refuses packaging as decoration and turns it into a manifesto.
Puntamari at the World Gin Awards: When the Land Becomes a Medal
Winning at the World Gin Awards with a spirit born in Otranto, on the border between the Adriatic and the Ionian, confirms that there is a category — the award-winning gin from Puglia — that no longer needs to justify itself against the big names of northern Europe. Puntamari brought the Punta Palascìa lighthouse to an international blind competition and got it recognised.
Part of the proceeds from every bottle goes to protecting Salento's olive trees struck by Xylella. Every sip carries weight: the 2025 medal certifies the quality of what is in the glass; buying it supports the land that glass comes from. These Puntamari World Gin Awards are not the finish line — they are proof that we are on the right road.
Discover Puntamari, the artisanal gin from Puglia awarded at the World Gin Awards 2025. Order it directly at puntamarigin.com and bring Salento to your glass.