Smirnoff

Smirnoff was born in Moscow with Pyotr Arsenievich Smirnov (1831–1898), who was born a serf, started out as a small drinks seller and became one of Russia's richest merchants. The brand takes 1864 as its founding year: according to Diageo, that is when he opened his distillery and began filtering vodka through charcoal, a new method at the time. The vodka came to be supplied to the imperial court — according to Diageo, because Tsar Alexander III was impressed by its quality.

After the 1917 Revolution, his son Vladimir fled Russia, passed through Constantinople and re-established the brand in exile, in Europe, in the early 1920s, under the Western spelling of the family name: Smirnoff. In 1933 he sold the rights to the name to Rudolph Kunett, a Russian émigré in the United States, whose sales were slow; in 1939 John G. Martin, president of Heublein, bought the American rights for 14,000 dollars. In the early 1940s, Martin and Jack Morgan, who had unsold ginger beer, combined the two in the Moscow Mule, which helped make vodka popular in the country, and by 1978 Smirnoff was the best-selling spirit in the United States. The brand passed to Grand Metropolitan in 1987, and Grand Met's merger with Guinness created Diageo, the current owner, in 1997.