Smells like clean spirit.
Many great products are born of frustration. For Katherine Jenkins—the Welsh mezzo-soprano who cofounded Cygnet Gin with her husband, American artist and filmmaker Andrew Levitas, in 2022—that frustration was a clash between her artistic discipline and her favourite tipple.
“Everyone in my family drinks gin, me included,” Jenkins, a regular on British T.V. who performs pop and musical theatre as well as operatic arias, tells Robb Report at a launch event in a rural retreat 65 miles south-east of London. “But when I went to study at the Royal Academy of Music, and they talked to us about how to protect your voice, one of the conversations was about alcohol. Harsh spirits, especially with carbonated mixers: not good. So, mortifyingly, gin and tonics were not allowed any longer.”
And so, when Covid came along and Levitas suggested the pair collaborate on a new creative venture, Jenkins saw a window of opportunity: “To make a gin that I can actually drink—something that is so clean it doesn’t affect my voice. I was never really thinking about a brand. At this point it was just a personal need.”
The couple came up with a recipe containing 22 botanicals, larynx-soothing ingredients, Manuka honey, bee pollen, and chamomile among them. The result was an ultra-premium sipping gin Cygnet 22, whose exceptional flavour and smooth texture Jenkins also attributes to “Welsh Ice-Age water” and the 300-litre copper pot still—named “Blodwen” as a nod to the first opera written in Welsh, used by the sixth-generation distillers Cygnet Distillery chose as partners. (Disclosure: The brand is also a partner of Robb Report.) A gold medal at the 2024 International Wine & Spirit Competition is only one of the accolades Cygnet 22 has had bestowed upon it in just four years.
The company’s repertoire also includes Cygnet 77, an expression imbued with complex woody overtones by aging in Welsh whisky oak barrels for 12 months. But now, Cygnet has a new major outlier in its lineup: Cygnet Infinity: a version of Cygnet 22 where the alcohol has been distilled out and a symphony of restorative, mood-bolstering adaptogens (notably focus-enhancing lion’s mane) has been added. It launches in the U.S. later this year.
“Other non-alcoholic spirits try to emulate the taste of their alcoholic counterparts, and it ends up being a watered-down version of the original,” says Jenkins (who hit the Golden Globes red carpet, alongside Levitas, carrying a bottle of Cygnet a few days after our conversation). “So we’ve powered it with functional botanicals. The lion’s mane needs a two-hour infusion process to get the most out of it, then Siberian ginseng, schisandra berry, rosehip hibiscus, chrysanthemum, and capsicum all go in at different points at the optimum time to get the most out of them.”
It feels like a culturally timely release, with less and less reported to be drinking alcohol. But Cygnet Infinity—which received gold at the Spirits Business’s Low & No Masters 2026 Awards—is less about abstinence than embracement. “I prefer to focus on what you’re gaining out of it—you’re not missing out,” concludes Jenkins.
