The best-selling speciality spirits Brand Champions
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past year, 2025’s top-selling speciality spirit won’t come as much of a surprise.
Having settled into the top spot in The Brand Champions 2025 as the world’s biggest-selling speciality spirit, one certain recognisably orange brand continued its domination by Spritz in 2025.
Another big-selling speciality spirit from Germany also showed that with the right innovation – an often contentious term in the industry – and the right marketing, fortunes can change very quickly.
Other trends tapped into by the world’s biggest speciality brands include the continued rise in aperitivo culture, lighter drinking profiles, ready-to-drink options and younger drinkers drawn to summers spent in Italy and the south of France.
For the top-selling speciality spirits from The Brand Champions 2026 report, which is available to read online in full for free, scroll down.
The data is listed to one decimal place for ease of reading, but the percentage changes were calculated on the full data supplied. All data is recorded in millions of nine-litre cases.
7. Lillet
Owner: Pernod Ricard
2021: 1.0m | 2022: 1.3m | 2023: 1.2m | 2024: 1.3m | 2025: 1.1m
Growth: -14.2%
Place last year: 6
The first of Pernod Ricard’s brands on this list dropped a rank this year, after falling from 1.3m to 1.1m cases. The decline reflects an up-and-down five years for Maison Lillet, during which it hasn’t managed to post two consecutive years of growth. Nevertheless, it remains a 1m-case-selling brand.
The aperitif received a ‘chic’ rebrand last May. Earlier this year, it released a non-alcoholic Blanc 0% to meet what Francesco Ottaviano, vice-president for gins and apéritifs at Pernod Ricard, called not just a trend, but “a new way of socialising”.
6. Ramazzotti
Owner: Pernod Ricard
2021: 1.3m | 2022: 1.5m | 2023: 1.2m | 2024: 1.2m | 2025: 1.3m
Growth: 9.2%
Place last year: 7
Bitters brand Ramazzotti usurped its Pernod stablemate Lillet to jump up to sixth position on the speciality spirits rankings. The brand had struggled since its 2022 peak, but it put those results in the rearview mirror in 2025, with a 9.2% rise to 1.3m cases. The brand is one of Italy’s oldest amaro producers with a recipe (33 aromatic herbs and roots) that has reported remained unchanged since 1815.
Like Lillet, Ramazzotti also entered the non-alcoholic space last May, launching Aperitivo Arancia 0.0% first in Germany and Austria. Described as a ‘modern take on the classic Italian aperitivo’, Pernod said the release reflects its ‘commitment to providing consumers more alternative options’.
5. Ricard
Owner: Pernod Ricard
2021: 4.3m | 2022: 4.6m | 2023: 4.2m | 2024: 4.3m | 2025: 4.1m
Growth: -3.1%
Place last year: 5
Completing the Pernod speciality spirits trinity is Ricard, which slid to 4.1m cases – its lowest sales total since 2020. Compared with Campari – once a smaller brand by volume – Ricard seems to be swimming against the tide.
The world’s best-selling anise brand is back to where it was in 2020, when it also hit 4.1m cases, but its parent company has already rolled up its sleeves to improve its performance. It launched a Ricard ready-to-drink (RTD) product in France last year, offering the spirit in a more accessible format: a 4.5% ABV drink in a 200ml bottle that requires no mixing.
4. Campari
Owner: Campari Group
2021: 3.9m | 2022: 4.5m | 2023: 4.6m | 2024: 4.8m | 2025: 4.9m
Growth: 2.1%
Place last year: 4
Though its ascendance is less pronounced than Aperol’s, Campari Group’s eponymous bitter continued its steady rise last year as it inched closer to 5m cases. The brand has been flirting with the milestone since its big jump in 2022, when it went from 3.9m to 4.5m. Now at 4.9m, it seems to be a matter of when, not if.
So far in 2026, its eponymous parent firm has launched a bottled Campari Spritz in Italy, which CEO Simon Hunt said had helped the brand in its home market. With a “solid start” to the year, could catching up with Martini Vermouth be the brand’s next target?
3. Martini Vermouth
Owner: Bacardi
2021: 9.6m | 2022: 9.9m | 2023: 9.6m | 2024: 9.2m | 2025: 8.2m
Growth: -10.8%
Place last year: 2
Bacardi’s Martini Vermouth has struggled to find a formula for growth like its competitors in recent years. The brand was once the world’s biggest-selling speciality spirit (in its heyday of 2022, when it hit 9.9m cases), but it now finds itself in third place for the first time after falling by 10.8% in 2025.
To fix its decline, Bacardi debuted a contemporary new look and a marketing campaign called ‘Dare To Be‘ for the vermouth brand last year. The brand is also looking to wrangle the Spritz from its rivals this summer, helped by its Martini Man Jonathan Bailey, who should turn a few heads and get people drinking Bianco Spritzes if its latest campaign is anything to go by.
2. Jägermeister
Owner: Mast-Jägermeister
2021: 8.7m | 2022: 9.4m | 2023: 9.2m | 2024: 8.5m | 2025: 9.2m
Growth: 7.8%
Place last year: 3
After a hands-on-head performance in 2024, Jägermeister stepped up its game in a big way last year, resulting in an impressive 7.8% climb back to 9.2m cases. It’s still below its peak of 9.4m in 2022, but the German herbal liqueur has overtaken Martini Vermouth and is seemingly aiming for the number-one position.
Owner Mast-Jägermeister got the innovation right last year with the introduction of a new orange expression called Jägermeister Orange. The release adds oranges, mandarins, and a fruity profile to the flagship classic. According to the company, it had already sold more than five million bottles by March 2026 and was helping to bring younger LDA [legal-drinking-age] drinkers to the brand.
In April, meanwhile, Mast-Jägermeister completed construction of its new €17.6 million (US$20.6m) barrel storage facility in Germany, which will support additional production capacity. The project has been hailed as one of the herbal liqueur maker’s largest investments in recent years.
1. Aperol
Owner: Campari Group
2021: 7.1m | 2022: 8.8m | 2023: 9.6m | 2024: 9.9m | 2025: 10.0m
Growth: 1.0%
Place last year: 1
It was only ever going to be Aperol. Campari Group’s powerhouse aperitivo rules the roost during summer and it’s starting to take over winter too, as the Aperol Spritz zeros in on occasions such as après-ski. Name a time and a place, and Aperol will be there. The Aperolidays campaign, launched in collaboration with actor Nina Dobrev in November 2025, was an example of Campari Group’s “deseasonalisation strategy” for the brand.
Aperol technically reached the 10m-case milestone through rounding; however, its total sales fell just short, despite a 1% jump. Aperol’s dominance is hard to deny, and its year-on-year growth from a large starting base saw it reclaim its title of Speciality Spirits Brand Champion.
According to Andrea Neri, managing director of House of Aperitifs at Campari Group, long-term brand building and playing into top consumer trends like low-alcohol preferences and outdoor socialising are key to Aperol’s sustained growth. Regarding the Aperol Spritz’s rise to stardom, Neri said: “Over the past 25 years, this distinctive appeal has expanded from around 60m serves per year in Northern Italy to more than 1.5 billion serves globally.”
The Aperol Spritz has gone global, manoeuvring itself into wintertime and major cultural and sporting events, such as Coachella festival in the US, and the Australian and US Open Tennis Grand Slams. Neri said that 10 years ago, 75% of Aperol sales were concentrated in Italy and Germany. “Today, 75% of Aperol sales are distributed across six markets: Italy, Germany, Austria, France, the US, and the UK,” she said, adding that “the US is already the third-largest market with a lot of room for growth”.
And don’t expect things to slow down for Aperol any time soon. To start 2026, the brand has already unveiled a new design for its bottle, moved into the ready-to-drink space with Aperol Spritz To Go, and will further expand in the US and Asia-Pacific.
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