A SUPERMARKET own-brand gin has been named the “best in Britain” and is cheaper than any of the leading brands.

Aldi's £14.99 Haysmith's Seville Orange and Persian Lime Gin won gold at The World Gin Awards – the highest accolade at the ceremony.

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The gin won the Best in Country award and was crowned the best in Britain in the flavored gin category.

The 70cl gin contains 40% alcohol and beats competitors such as Tanqueray and Sipsmith in terms of price.

Tanqueray's bittersweet Flor de Sevilla gin costs a whopping £27 at Sainsbury's – 46% less.

It's also cheaper than Sipsmith's zesty orange gin, which costs £30 in Waitrose. This is 50% more than Aldi's own brand gin.

You can order Aldi's gin online, but you have to click and collect. If you're unsure, the nearest store will appear in the website's store locator.

However, the gin is available in all 1,000 supermarkets, so if that's easier, you can visit in person first.

If you really want to try it, we recommend calling first to make sure it's in stock.

It can be popular if you follow the news, and you don't want to be disappointed.

It is not the first time that Aldi's drink has received a top price.

Last year, Haysmith's rhubarb and ginger gin was named the best in the world at the International Wine and Spirit Competition (IWSC).

The judges praised Aldi's bottle, describing it as “excellently well balanced” with “rich flavors of delicious rhubarb”.

In 2019, Greyson's Seville Orange and Persia won the prestigious title of “masters” at the Spirits Business Gin Masters Awards.

It also cost €14.99 at the time.

The value-for-money gin came out on top, despite being £10 cheaper than rival brand Tanqueray's Flor de Sevilla Gin.

And in both 2017 and 2018, the supermarket's £9.99 Oliver Cromwell London Dry Gin became a sell-out sensation when it won the top prize at the International Spirits Challenge (ISC) and the IWSC.

It beat brands like Sipsmith, Beefeater and Gordon's.

However, if you enjoy an alcoholic drink every now and then, make sure you still drink responsibly.

There are sites and helplines you can use if you are concerned about yourself or someone else. Be sure to visit this one Drink conscious or Drink responsibly for more help and advice.

Do you have a money problem that needs to be solved? Get in touch by emailing money@the-sun.co.uk.

Moreover, you can join us Sun Money chats and tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories.

What first attracted Princess Diana to multi-millionaire Dodi Fayed? That’s one of the many questions left unasked and unanswered in the new series of The Crown, released today.

We all have assumptions, we all have theories, we all have The Crown suggesting – as they do here – that Dodi was a weakling controlled by his puppeteer father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw).

It is the cunning, socially ambitious Mohamed who arranges the ill-fated hunting holiday that marks the beginning of the end for poor Diana.

It is Mohamed who urges Dodi to dump his awkward American fiancée; and it’s Mohamed who is helplessly dead and can’t sue The Crown for portraying him as a mangy fixer who crows about putting Diana “on a plate” for Dodi and urges his son to “seal the deal” .

Real? Uhm. In other chilling scenes from that pivotal holiday in the summer of 1997, Dodi (Khalid Abdalla) writes love poems and has his words engraved on a silver plaque, which he hands to an unimpressed Diana (Elizabeth Debicki).

‘A bit angry. Completely exaggerated,” she tells a friend on the phone.

Dodi even fails to read the room as Diana, glittering and lithe in a swimsuit, talks earnestly about her landmine campaign and the injuries suffered by many victims.

‘At least you still have your legs. Losing them would be a crime against humanity,” says Dodi, running a brutal hand over her thigh. It’s certainly a crime against screenwriting, although we’re more certain when Dodi proposes and Diana refuses.

“I can’t make your father love you more by becoming your wife,” she says.

Yet they head to Paris anyway, where the dreaded hand of history awaits.

Is that really what happened in the days leading up to the terrible events in the Alma Tunnel? No one knows for sure, which is the eternal problem of and for The Crown; a drama made for entertainment purposes that delves into recent events and effortlessly delves into the souls of both the dearly departed and the living.

Yes, the Royal Family are some of the most closely observed people on Earth, but when The Crown can’t go deeper than skin deep, when the flesh underneath isn’t available for examination, they just dig in and make it all up, it makes them no matter who they might injure.

To this day, no one knows for sure whether Dodi actually proposed to Diana, but his proposal is presented here as fact, without even a fig leaf of dramatic speculation.

Prince Harry, who is on Netflix’s payroll for other projects, appears relaxed about a show that portrays him as a glassy-eyed 12-year-old whose lifelong trauma over his mother’s untimely death is now being streamed into millions of homes.

Earlier this year, Harry claimed he had seen The Crown and ‘checked’ it out for himself. He said he didn’t mind if it was infringed because viewers understand it’s fiction.

I wish I had his faith in the popcorn-munching proles who will gobble this up like every word and scene is real.

Yet the storyline of this sixth and final series of The Crown is so powerful, the acting so delightful and the entire production so magnificent in every way, that it might be a little difficult to argue about who said what to whom on the All -Fayed Hunt or at Balmoral Castle. to miss the point.

From gin palace to royal palace, The Crown is the most lavish soap opera ever made, a big-budget psychodrama filled with more British Premier League actors than a Harry Potter film. Resistance to his charms is futile.

Yes, the incessant intrusions into the royal family’s most intimate moments and the imagined conversations concocted for dramatic purposes could be considered extremely tasteless, but at least The Crown has credit for the car crash in Paris and the events that follow with great sensitivity.

As the clock ticks inexorably towards the great unbearable, Debicki’s Diana – a luminous portrait of a woman in her prime – moves through Paris in scenes that are rivetingly familiar; as she slipped in and out of the Ritz in her white jeans, Dodi’s hand on the small of her back; that unmistakable cap of blond hair glimpsed through the window of a speeding car.

It’s downright terrifying.

But elsewhere I sense a hint of sadism in the way the royal family is depicted? There’s certainly no let-up here, with Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) still an unfeeling old brute and Princess Anne (Claudia Harrison) shoveling pureed pheasant into her royal gob before concluding that the only gloomy Prince William (Rufus Kampa) all you need to do is go out and shoot a deer, which is certainly one way to cope.

Lesley Manville gives a lovely performance as Princess Margaret, permanently smoking in navy blue sequins as she glares at Camilla (Olivia Williams), who is depicted as little more than a fat hurrah who giggles when she goes ‘about t*t’ in front of her of photographers.

All very funny, but the constant caricature of the Queen (Imelda Staunton) as an unfeeling mother who cannot cry seems not only one-dimensional, but also cruel and unfair.

Only Prince Charles (Dominic West, excellent) gets a sensitive hinterland; after Diana’s death we see him capsized with remorse and imbued with a sudden emotional intelligence previously unnoticed in the great cufflink violinist.

‘Sweetheart, mommy? Love?’ he bellows at one point, as the queen ignores him and fusses over a corgi instead.

Only Diana’s ghost – not as crazy as it sounds – has its size. In a strangely moving scene, Charles expresses regret to her about, well, everything.

“That will pass,” she tells him. “No, it won’t,” he answers.

Well, we all know who was right about that.

A few years ago Britain was on a gin boom, with distilleries opening up all over the country and infusing the drink with many products from cheese to marshmallows.

From 2015 to 2020, the gin boom – dubbed the ‘ginaissance’ – saw the total number of UK distilleries more than double, from 184 to at least 441.

But it seems that the wave of “mother ruin” is really over, with the biggest brands taking massive losses over the past year.

Gordon’s – one of the country’s most popular gins – lost £72.8 million according to this year’s Britain’s Biggest Alcohol Brands data seen by the trade magazine The Grocer.

This is the largest decline of any alcohol brand – with sales down 20.5 percent.

Tanqueray, Bombay Sapphire and Whitley Neil also suffered huge losses with 7.7 million fewer liters going through the box office, with a loss of £33.9 million.

It’s because sales of Britain’s top 100 best-selling alcohol brands have fallen by more than £1.5 billion over the past year as the country gives up its favorite drinks to save money.

However, both Gordon’s and Tanqueray have seen success in their non-alcoholic versions.

‘The Gordon’s 0.0 SKUs [stock keeping unit] continue to deliver for the brand, with Gordon’s proud majority of shares in the non-alcoholic spirits segment,” Hazan Aydin, head of Gordon’s, told the trade journal.

A spokesperson for Whitley Neil added that customers are “more mindful than ever” with their alcohol consumption.

However, smaller and boutique gin brands seem to have caught the wave.

Masons of Yorkshire seems to buck this trend.

Business has been on the up since Covid – a 29 percent increase in sales in 2020 versus 2022.

Co-founder Karl Mason told FEMAIL: ‘The “budget” gin brands are feeling the heat while the premium brands continue to grow’

‘Supermarkets invest in A brands.’

“The brands that follow the fad suffer, we’ve stood our ground and stayed true to our quality roots.”

Once considered a drink for old aunts, the spirit, traditionally flavored with juniper, has become popular with younger drinkers. In 2017, the drink was added to the official basket of goods used by the Office of National Statistics to calculate inflation.

Inexpensive and often distilled in bathtubs, in 18th century London gin was sold by barbers, grocers and even sold at market stalls.

The impact was so great that it was demonized as “mother ruin.”

The drink fell out of fashion until the 1970s, when G&T became the drink of choice for dinner parties.

However, vodka has benefited from a move by drinkers to flavored versions and a growing trend to make cocktails at home.

Lauren Priestley, head of category development at Diageo — owner of both Gordon’s and Smirnoff — attributed much of vodka’s success to the cocktail trend, leading to “an increased share of spirits in the hospitality and hospitality industry.”

I am 100 years old and the secret to longevity is drinking GIN

By Monique Rubins For Mailonline

published: 09:01 EDT, Jun 15, 2023 | Updated: 09:30 EDT, June 15, 2023