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Fadekemi Ajakaiye

Gin Mare, the ultra-premium Spanish gin, recently held its Mediterranean Experience- Bartenders Edition in Lagos, bringing together a select group of bartenders and mixologists for an immersive session built around the brand’s botanicals, cocktail craft and food culture.

The programme was structured around what Gin Mare calls “The Mediterranean Hour,” a signature concept for the transition from afternoon into evening: a deliberate pause where people gather, and the drink becomes part of something larger.

“Lagos already knows how to make an evening matter. That instinct is here,” said Oyinkansola Afolabi, Brand Manager for Gin Mare. “What we wanted to do was put the gin in the hands of the people who shape those evenings and let them decide what it becomes in this city.”

It is a concept the brand has taken to several international markets, and in Lagos it landed on familiar terrain. The city’s after-work culture, its appetite for outdoor gatherings and long evenings over food and conversation, already operates on a similar frequency. The music, the pacing, the way food and drink moved together through the evening all tracked with how Lagos already socialises.

Attendees worked hands-on with the gin’s raw botanicals, built cocktails around the “Perfect Serve” format, and explored how food, atmosphere and timing shape the drinking occasion. The structure was collaborative: bartenders were given the building blocks and the space to create their own serves, building from the ground up.

For many in attendance, the session marked their first sustained encounter with Gin Mare. The format gave them space to understand the gin on their own terms, to experiment with it, and to begin forming their own view of where it fits on a Lagos menu.

“When a bartender has spent an evening with a gin, worked with the ingredients, tasted it alongside food, that stays with them. It shapes how they talk about it and who they pour it for,” Afolabi said.

Nigeria’s spirits market, valued at close to $370 million in 2024 according to Statista, is seeing gin gain momentum through innovation, with premiumisation and urbanisation driving demand among young professionals. Cocktail bars and experience-driven venues have been opening steadily across Lagos and Abuja, and for a category like gin, where the product story matters as much as the liquid, that growing sophistication has created real room to compete.

The bartenders who attended the Lagos Mediterranean Experience now carry that story with them, and the conversations that started there are set to continue at the bar.