The

bar · 800+ bottles The Jefferson on Fort Street operates as both a serious whisky library — over eight hundred bottles, the deepest list in the South Pacific — and a working cocktail bar that uses the back-bar as its actual mise en place. Owner Andrew Pang's Japanese section is the standout: a Hibiki 17 vertical, Karuizawa singles, and the kind of Yamazaki, Hakushu and Nikka allocations that no longer reach most rooms in Asia.

The cocktail programme is whisky-led and unfashionably serious: a smoked old-fashioned built on Booker's, a Japanese highball that uses house-carved ice, a Penicillin made with Islay peat smoke. The room is one hundred seats, dark wood, leather Chesterfields. Third because the whisky library is genuinely world-class and the cocktail programme refuses to be a sideshow to the bottle wall.

For the full ranking, see our editorial round-up of the 10 best cocktail bars in Auckland, the broader Auckland cocktail bars guide, and our category index of cocktail bars worldwide.