A state distillery, a 1938 trademark and a label older than the vodka.

Stolichnaya is a vodka made from wheat and rye, and its name is the adjectival form of the Russian word for “capital city,” The New York Times explained in 1991. English Wikipedia traces its roots to Moscow State Wine Warehouse No. 1, a state distillery that opened on the Yauza river in 1901 and is known today as Kristall, which that encyclopedia calls the birthplace of the brand.

The brand’s exact starting date is disputed. A trademark registration dated 1938 is often given as its birth year, and the company that sells it outside Russia today says on its website that the original recipe was developed that year. In a 2008 article for the branding site PopSop, Vladimir Ulyanov gave 1948 as the earliest confirmed production date while noting that the label design is older than 1946; a 2004 article in the Russian magazine Ogonyok attributes the label, created around 1944, to V. G. Svirida, English Wikipedia says, though it presents that attribution as likely rather than certain.

That label became the brand’s most recognisable piece of design. On the version sold by the Russian state company Soyuzplodoimport, the words “Stolichnaya Vodka” are set in gold cursive script above a drawing of the Hotel Moskva, a Moscow landmark that has since been rebuilt, English Wikipedia notes, citing a 2003 article in The Guardian by the architecture critic Jonathan Glancey.

Early recognition is recorded in two versions. PopSop says Stolichnaya won a gold medal when it was shown at an international trade show in Bern in 1953; the brand’s own timeline instead names its first gold medal as one won at the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1958. The two accounts differ.

Pepsi, the West and a run of flavours.

Stolichnaya reached Western shelves through one of the more unusual trade deals of the Cold War. In 1972, English Wikipedia says, PepsiCo agreed a barter arrangement with the Soviet government under which it received export and Western marketing rights to Stolichnaya in exchange for producing and selling Pepsi-Cola in the Soviet Union. The brand’s own timeline describes it as one of the first premium vodkas imported into the United States in the 1970s. PepsiCo kept the American rights after the Soviet Union dissolved — a federal judge ruled in its favour in November 1992 — and in 2009 William Grant & Sons took over American distribution until the end of 2013, when the brand’s owner chose to manage it directly, according to English Wikipedia.

Flavours became a large part of the brand. The company says it was one of the pioneers of flavoured vodka in the 1960s and launched six new flavours in 1996. Many of the later variants carry deliberately phonetic names such as Razberi, Ohranj, Vanil and Citros; a 2004 trade report said Stoli Razberi had passed one million cases. In 2003 the brand introduced an ultra-premium vodka, known as Elit and today sold as Gold, according to the company, and Elit won a silver medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in 2011, English Wikipedia says. A gluten-free variant made from corn followed, the company says.

Packaging has changed several times under the current owner. The company says its bottle now carries the map coordinates of ten cities it associates with diversity and creativity. In 2022 it issued a limited edition designed by the artist Jason Naylor for more than 20 countries, and in 2023–2024, by its own account, it unveiled what it calls a bold new look.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all vodka names: Belvedere, Ketel One, Stolichnaya, Russian Standard, Finlandia, Tito’s and Żubrówka. Vodka brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a duty-free shelf.

A vodka brand’s identity is usually carried less by the spirit itself than by a bottle, a label and the place it names, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its distilling or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its vodka is actually distilled 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 vodka is made and how its bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two owners, two bottlings and a new short name.

The brand split into two after the Soviet Union ended. English Wikipedia describes how the state exporter that controlled the trademarks was reorganised in stages in the 1990s; in 1997 the marks passed to a company called ZAO Sojuzplodimport, which sold them in 1999 to the SPI Group, a private company chartered in Luxembourg and founded and owned by the businessman Yuri Shefler. Since 2003 the Russian state company FKP Sojuzplodoimport and SPI have contested ownership of the trademarks in courts in Russia, Austria, the Benelux countries and the United States, with different results in different countries, according to English Wikipedia.

As a result there are two products. The version sold inside Russia is made there by the state company — in Kaliningrad, English Wikipedia says. The version sold elsewhere is SPI’s. Its website says it has been bottled at the Latvijas Balzams plant in Riga since 1954 and is still bottled there; the same Riga company makes Riga Black Balsam. The New York Times reported in September 2013 that SPI’s vodka used Latvian water and alcohol from a distillery in Tambov, Russia, and in March 2022 CNN reported that SPI said it would source its alcohol from Slovakia instead. The brand’s website names SPI Spirits (Cyprus) Limited as its global distributor and Stoli Group USA, of New York, as its American distributor.

The name itself was shortened. In March 2022 SPI renamed its vodka Stoli, the nickname it had long carried, Business Insider reported, and its current bottles and website use that name throughout. The Hotel Moskva label described above belongs to the Russian state company’s version.

For a design guide, Stolichnaya shows how a label can outlast the system that made it, and how one name can divide into two brands with separate identities. Read our note on the Stolichnaya font, and compare Riga Black Balsam, made at the same Riga plant, and Russian Standard, its long-time rival. For this guide we use label red, script gold and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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