A distiller arrives on Lesvos, and a family stays for five generations.

Barbayanni is the ouzo of the Barbayannis family, made in Plomari, a port town on the south coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails (Oxford University Press, 2021), in an entry by Doug Frost, says the brand was founded in 1860 in Plomari by Efstathios Barbayannis, who had worked as a distiller in the Russian city of Odessa, served as a sailor during a Greek–Turkish war and later became a politician and philanthropist. The company tells the same story in its own words: Efstathios J. Barbayannis arrived in Plomari in 1860, brought his knowledge of distillation with him from Odessa, and started his own distillery there.

The family name and the brand name are spelled in more than one way. The bottles say Barbayanni; the company’s English-language material calls the family Barbayannis; and in Greek the name is written Βαρβαγιάννη, which is often transliterated as Varvagianni. The Greek Federation of Spirits Producers (SEAOP), the Greek spirits trade body, lists the business among its members as Barbayannis Ouzo Distilleries Ltd, under the heading Ouzo of Plomari.

Ownership has stayed in the family. The Oxford Companion says that five generations on, the family still keeps its ouzo recipes secret, and the company’s website, in versions archived in 2021, described its Plomari production facilities as privately owned. A company press release published by the Greek business daily Naftemporiki on 4 July 2018 called the business a purely family company that had operated continuously in Plomari since 1860, with the fifth and sixth generations at the helm; the release named Vagia Barbayanni as the representative of the fifth generation. The same release said the company helped establish the terms “ouzo of Plomari” and “100% distilled” in the Greek market, a claim the company makes about itself. Its export markets at the time, the release said, included Europe, Cyprus and the United States.

Colour-named labels, a classic Blue and a bottle for an anniversary.

The range is organised by name and colour. In versions archived in 2021 and 2022, the company’s website presented five labels: Green, described as a soft taste at 42% vol.; Blue, the classic, at 46% vol.; Evzon, a traditional aperitif at 47% vol.; Aphrodite, a mature taste at 48% vol.; and a Collectible bottle at 46% vol. The Oxford Companion likewise singles out the classic Blue Label alongside four other ouzo expressions, and the travel site travel.gr, in a profile published on 30 April 2023, named Ouzo Barbayanni Blue as the ouzo Efstathios Barbayannis made.

The company frames each label around the same idea. Its website called every Barbayanni ouzo 100% distilled, made with aniseed and local herbs, and said the classic Blue follows the family recipe that Efstathios Barbayannis brought with him in 1860. The Oxford Companion adds that, according to the producer, the ouzos are based on raisin spirit rectified with anise in pot stills. On Evzon, the company says it was first produced in 1950 as a new, stronger flavour for the brand’s regular drinkers.

Two of the labels carry their own stories. The Collectible bottle, the company says, holds a “superior quality distillation” produced in restricted quantities for the 150th anniversary of the family’s presence in ouzo production. The Blue has a place in the company museum: the museum page on the company website said visitors can see the original equipment used to bottle and label Ouzo Barbayanni Blue.

The town’s name is itself protected. Ouzo of Plomari is one of the Greek spirit drinks registered as a geographical indication under Article 37 of the European Union’s Regulation 2019/787, according to the register of Greek GIs published by SEAOP, which lists it alongside Ouzo of Mitilene, Ouzo of Kalamata, Ouzo of Thrace and Ouzo of Macedonia.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are drinks names from Greece, Cyprus and Turkey: Barbayanni, Vallindras, KEO, Mythos, Babatzim, Efe Rakı and Tekirdağ Rakı. Around the eastern Mediterranean, anise spirits, grape spirits, citron liqueur, wine and beer sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that began inside a state monopoly or now belong to much larger drinks groups.

A drinks brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually distilled, brewed or bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A distillery, a museum and a family name in two alphabets.

The family put its history on show beside the stills. The 2018 company release said the Barbayannis family founded its Ouzo Museum in Plomari in 1996. The company’s website said the museum stands next to the distillery, at the first kilometre of the Plomari–Mytilene provincial road, and that its exhibits include the family’s first alembic, which the company says was built in 1858 in Constantinople and used to test the recipes, together with the original equipment for bottling and labelling the Blue. The same page listed a visitors’ centre, a gift shop and audio-visual shows in English and Greek.

Plomari has more than one ouzo house, and more than one museum. The town is also home to Plomari, the ouzo of the Isidoros Arvanitis distillery, whose own museum, The World of Ouzo, the Greek news site Powergame.gr described in June 2021; visitors looking for the Barbayannis collection should note the two are separate.

The brand’s name needs a little care online. The company’s long-standing English site, barbayanni-ouzo.com, carried the five labels, the museum and the family history in archived versions from 2021 and 2022, and credited the agency United Online S.A. for its digital strategy and web creation; SEAOP’s member listing gives varvayanni.com as the company’s web address. Searches in Greek work best with the spelling Βαρβαγιάννη.

For a design guide, Barbayanni shows how a family name, a port town and a short run of colour-named labels can carry a nineteenth-century ouzo house through five generations, with one classic bottle, the Blue, at the centre. Compare Plomari, its Lesvos neighbour, and Ouzo 12, the ouzo named after its twelfth barrel. For this guide we use label blue, navy and anise white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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