The international drinks awards landscape is crowded. Medals are plentiful, entry lists are long, and outcomes are often opaque.
Yet for producers, buyers and brand owners alike, awards still matter – not just for recognition, but for understanding how products perform in an increasingly competitive global market.
The Global Drinks Awards were created to address this imbalance.
Run by Global Drinks Intel, the Global Drinks Awards are a new international, trade-led awards programme built around a simple principle: credible recognition should be supported by transparent assessment and meaningful feedback, not medals alone.
At the heart of the Global Drinks Awards are three defining principles that set them apart within the awards landscape:
- Transparency
All entrants receive their collated scores and anonymised judges’ feedback, whether they win a medal or not. The Awards are designed to provide clarity around how products are assessed and how outcomes are reached, ensuring results deliver genuine insight rather than opaque outcomes.
- Equality & Diversity
Judging panels are constructed deliberately to reflect the global drinks industry, with a balanced mix of genders, professional backgrounds and geographic perspectives. Equality and diversity are treated as measurable criteria in panel composition, not aspirational statements, making the Global Drinks Awards distinct in their approach.
- Charity
Each year, the Global Drinks Awards select two charities to support. These partnerships are embedded within the Awards programme, ensuring the platform contributes positively beyond commercial recognition and delivers tangible social impact.
Why the Global Drinks Awards exist
Producers enter awards for many reasons: to validate quality, support marketing, influence buyers and build brand credibility. Too often, however, the process ends with a medal – or nothing at all – and little understanding of why a product performed as it did.
The Global Drinks Awards were designed to go further.
By combining blind judging, structured scoring and trade-level interpretation, the Awards aim to provide producers with a clearer understanding of how their products perform within their competitive set – not just how they taste in isolation. Every result is intended to inform, not obscure.
Trade-led judging with transparency at its core
All products entered into the Global Drinks Awards are judged blind, using structured, points-based scoring frameworks and published evaluation criteria.
Each product is assessed multiple times by different judges, with scores collated to ensure balance, consistency and transparency across categories. Medals are awarded strictly on merit, not on volume or entry thresholds.
Crucially, every entrant receives their collated scores and anonymised judges’ feedback, whether they win a medal or not. This ensures judging outcomes translate into practical, actionable insight for producers.
Judging panels are drawn from Global Drinks Intel’s international network of senior buyers, analysts, journalists and category specialists, ensuring assessments are commercially relevant and grounded in real-world trade perspectives.
Diversity by design, not by accident
Diversity is not treated as a marketing statement at the Global Drinks Awards – it is a deliberate and measurable design principle.
Judging panels are built with a 50:50 female/male split, with active consideration given to ethnic diversity, professional background and geographic representation across categories and international markets. This approach reflects how drinks are evaluated, purchased and consumed globally, and ensures no single perspective dominates the assessment process.
Clear boundaries, credible outcomes
To protect the integrity of the results, the Global Drinks Awards maintain clear boundaries around commercial influence. This includes a policy not to accept sponsorship from cask investment businesses, safeguarding the independence and credibility of the Awards.
Outcomes are driven by assessment, not association.
Beyond medals – Editorial insight and amplification
The Global Drinks Awards sit within Global Drinks Intel’s wider editorial ecosystem, ensuring results are contextualised rather than presented as standalone lists.
Winning products benefit from integrated, analysis-led editorial exposure, including:
- Coverage across print, digital, newsletter and social channels
- Results incorporated into insight-driven editorial and category analysis
- Storytelling that explains why products performed well
- Opportunities for interviews and partnered content
This ensures award-winning brands gain meaningful visibility with producers, buyers, distributors and decision-makers worldwide.
Categories and scope
The Global Drinks Awards cover spirits, fortified wines, RTDs and no- & low-alcohol products, with 32 clearly defined categories structured to reflect how products compete in-market.
Designed for commercial relevance
Entry fees are set at GBP195 (US$267) per product, with a 10% early-bird discount available until 3 May 2026.
All winners receive:
- Ready-to-use marketing assets and digital badges
- Social media toolkits for immediate promotion
Entries are open from 3 February 2026, with a final entry deadline of 24 September 2026 and bottle delivery by 2 October 2026.
A new benchmark for drinks awards
The Global Drinks Awards are not designed to replace existing competitions, but to raise expectations of what industry recognition should deliver.
By combining transparent scoring, diverse trade-led judging and meaningful editorial interpretation, the Awards aim to set a new benchmark – one that values insight as highly as medals.
