The 17 Best Places to Drink in New Zealand

Meat cleavers double as door handles, which sets the tone before you've ordered a drink. This cocktail bar sits inside a lakefront steakhouse in Queenstown, dressed up in plush contemporary style despite looking like a colonial cottage from the outside. The lake views do a lot of the heavy lifting in summer, and the crowd skews toward people who've had a good day on the slopes and don't mind showing it.

You reach the bar by descending a staircase and passing through a doorway flanked by paint tins, which sets up one expectation and then doesn't deliver it. Caretaker is a dim, NYC-styled speakeasy cocktail bar with Sunday jazz and bartenders who'd rather talk to you than hand you a laminated menu. Tell them what you're in the mood for and let them build something around it.

A cocktail bar on Tory Street where the menu runs from pre-Prohibition classics to drinks built around white anchovy oil and oyster shell-infused gin. The list treats history as a starting point rather than a destination, so you can order something a century old or something that sounds like a dare. Either way, the bartenders clearly mean business, and the kind of crowd that notices will find them here.

Central Otago pours run deep at this wine bar in Arrowtown, with bottles from the surrounding region joined by Barossa selections and vintage French champagnes. The high-ceilinged room keeps things unfussy, simply dressed tables and a relaxed pace that feels genuinely local rather than performed. An open kitchen runs along one side for anyone who wants something to watch with their glass.

A narrow beer bar tucked opposite Bardeaux on Queenstown's drinking circuit, Mini Bar runs a passport scheme where you drink your way around the world one bottle at a time, from over a hundred international options. Pop art in the Lichtenstein style covers the walls. There are cocktails on offer and a solid back-bar, but this is a beer place at heart, and the bartenders know it too.

Tucked above Minibar up a flight of stairs, this one-room cocktail bar has a vaulted ceiling and a sliver of a view over the corner below. It's a little rough around the edges, which is precisely its charm: bartenders drink here on their nights off, and by midnight the music has climbed accordingly. They chill the wine glasses before pouring cold whites, which tells you something about where their priorities sit.

A rusting padlock hangs off a battered blue door down a secluded alleyway off Arrowtown's main drag, and that's the whole address you'll need. This atmospheric bar sits in old gold-mining country where the high street already looks like a Western set, and the bar leans into that energy without trying too hard. The kind of place you find by accident and tell people about like a secret, even though everyone already knows.

Absinthe fountains, crystal decanters, and gold bartending equipment crowd the shelves of this cocktail bar, lit almost entirely by tea-lights. The menu sorts drinks by historical category, fizzes and daisies and the rest, each with a footnote on who invented it and where. The vibe is full-throated heritage emporium, which makes the thumping dance music either a charming contradiction or a minor existential crisis, depending on your mood.

Upstairs from the Red Rock pub, this small whisky bar fits leather chesterfields, barrel tables, and glass cases of whisky paraphernalia into a room that feels like a gentleman's club someone actually uses. Your feet rest on an old piece of railway line at the bar, which sets the tone. The selection covers Scotch, Japanese, Canadian, and bourbon, thorough enough for a good evening, and there are other spirits tucked in old crates below for anyone who wandered in by accident.