A Siberian distillery town, a Moscow drinks group and a first batch of 38 bottles.

Beluga is a vodka from Mariinsk, a town in the Kemerovo region of western Siberia whose economy, Russian Wikipedia notes, has long leaned on two industries: the railway and the liquor-and-vodka trade. The town’s distillery, the Mariinsk liqueur-and-vodka plant, is where the brand was born. Yegor Proskuryakov, then chief executive of Beluga North America, told Beverage Industry in June 2017 that the distillery was established in 1900, and that it created the first batch of Beluga Noble in 2002 in connection with the Moscow-based Synergy Group; that first batch, he said, ran to 38 bottles. English Wikipedia also dates the brand’s creation at Mariinsk to 2002.

Synergy (in Russian, Sinergiya) was a drinks group founded in 1999. Russian Wikipedia, in its history of the company, says the group bought the Beluga brand, together with the vodka Belenkaya, in 2007, the same year it listed its shares on the Moscow exchanges in November. The vodka then went abroad: Russian Wikipedia says Beluga entered European markets, the Middle East and the United States in 2008 and 2009, and Beverage Industry reported that the first cases reached the United States in 2009, with a subsidiary, Beluga North America, opening in Hallandale Beach, Florida, two years later. In May 2016 Summergate Fine Wine & Spirits became the brand’s exclusive importer and distributor for Greater China, English Wikipedia records.

The vodka gave the company its name. In 2017, Russian Wikipedia says, Synergy renamed its corporate brand Beluga Group. Production assets listed for the group include the Mariinsk plant alongside distilleries in Arkhangelsk, Ussuriysk, Perm and the Moscow region.

A fish in tin, a frosted bottle and a line of “noble” pursuits.

The name and the emblem are the same animal. The beluga is the great sturgeon of the Caspian and Black Sea basins, the source of beluga caviar, and the company has made the fish its signature. “Our brand’s symbol of uncompromising quality is the Beluga sturgeon fish,” Proskuryakov told Beverage Industry in 2017. “We apply the image of the Beluga sturgeon, shaped in tin, by hand on every bottle.” That small metal fish, fixed to the glass rather than printed on a label, is the brand’s most recognisable device.

The words do similar work. The same 2017 article noted that the bottles carried the line “The Noble Vodka”, and the flagship is Beluga Noble. The range around it was built on ideas of leisure and ceremony: Proskuryakov described Beluga Transatlantic Racing as a tribute to yachting and Beluga Allure as an homage to polo, while Beluga Gold Line was presented as a gastronomic vodka. In 2015 the company issued Beluga Celebration, a special edition of Noble marking what it called the 115th anniversary of the Mariinsk distillery.

Production is described in the company’s own terms. Beluga says it uses a malt spirit made from wheat and artesian water drawn from a deep well at the distillery, and that each vodka rests before bottling, for 30 days in the case of Noble and up to 90 days for Gold Line. Those are the company’s statements rather than independent findings.

Design partnerships have followed the same register. Russian Wikipedia lists a 2016 limited bottling, Beluga Epicure, made with the French crystal house Lalique, and The Spirits Business reported in December 2024 that Beluga had partnered with Lalique again in August 2024 on the second limited edition in its Epicure Series.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are vodka, liqueur and gin names: Svedka, Wyborowa, Beluga, Haku, Fireball, Passoã and Whitley Neill. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a hotel bar.

A spirits 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 place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled, blended and bottled.

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

Since 2022 the brand has had one owner inside Russia and another outside it.

The brand split in October 2022. Interfax reported on 19 October 2022 that Beluga Group had sold the international rights to its flagship Beluga vodka while keeping the rights to the trademark in Russia, without naming the buyer at the time. The company’s announcement cited foreign distributors that had declined to extend their partnerships with the Russian brand. The buyer was Noblewood Group: The Spirits Business reported in December 2024 that Noblewood had acquired the worldwide intellectual property rights to Beluga, excluding Russia, in October 2022, and described it as a privately held company founded in 2022, with its distillery and headquarters in Latvia and a production site in Montenegro.

Production for the international bottles moved with the rights. English Wikipedia says Noblewood began production in Montenegro in March 2023; Global Drinks Intel, interviewing Noblewood’s global business development director Andreas Ioannides in December 2023, gave April 2023. In that interview Ioannides said the brand “doesn’t have any ties to the government or to the war,” and acknowledged that the Montenegro production was not something the company emphasised. Noblewood has since pushed the brand in Britain: Just Drinks interviewed its UK country manager in July 2025.

Inside Russia the vodka stayed with the group that built it. Beluga Group renamed itself Novabev Group in 2023, Russian Wikipedia says, and still lists Beluga among its own brands, with the Mariinsk plant among its production sites. A bottle called Beluga may therefore come from either company, depending on where it is sold.

The name needs care. Beluga is also the sturgeon and its caviar, the white whale of Arctic waters and Airbus’s outsize cargo aircraft, so a search for the vodka is best made with the word “vodka” attached.

For a design guide, Beluga shows how one small, tactile emblem — a tin fish fixed by hand to frosted glass — can carry a vodka’s identity through a change of owner, country and distillery. Compare Russian Standard, the St Petersburg vodka of 1998, and Stolichnaya, the Soviet-era vodka now sold as Stoli. For this guide we use tin grey, slate and frost white with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Beluga’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.