A grandfather’s still, a physics graduate and a new law.

Tsilili is a tsipouro, the Greek spirit distilled from grape pomace, the skins left after pressing grapes for wine. It is made by K. Tsililis S.A., a family distillery in Raxa, near Trikala in western Thessaly, in the shadow of the Meteora rocks. The company’s profile with the Association of Greek Spirits Producers (SEAOP) says the distillery was founded in 1989 by the brothers Makis and Kostas Tsililis, who had learned distilling from their grandfather and father, and that the next generation of the family carries the work on.

Kostas Tsililis told the story in his own words to iefimerida.gr in October 2025. He grew up in a mountain village of Trikala in the 1960s, he said, where after the war his grandfather Efthymios Tsililis, then a warden of the village church, was responsible for the community still and taught his neighbours how to make tsipouro. In those years there was no bottled tsipouro; every house had its own, as the drink of hospitality.

The route to a brand was not direct. Tsililis said he studied physics, taught at a tutoring school in Trikala and then went to Athens to look for something new. Around that time, he said, a law was passed that allowed tsipouro to be bottled for the first time, and he took it as a sign. In Raxa he founded a tsipouro distillery and bottled the first batch. The company’s SEAOP profile goes further and says Tsipouro Tsilili was the first tsipouro to be bottled in Thessaly.

The market did not open at once. Tsililis told iefimerida.gr that doors were closed at first: people could not accept that a homemade drink could go into a bottle, and feared it would lose its authenticity. Ouzo dominated, and tsipouro was seen as a farmers’ drink of the provinces. His first supporters, he said, were people from the provinces living in Athens, who knew tsipouro from their villages and missed it, and who became the brand’s first ambassadors.

A family name on a clear spirit, with anise or without.

The brand is the family name. In Greek the product is Τσίπουρο Τσιλιλή, the tsipouro of Tsililis, and the company trades under the family name as K. Tsililis S.A. Its main product sits in the protected category Tsipouro of Thessaly, a Protected Geographical Indication, the company’s SEAOP profile says, describing a crystal-clear, aromatic spirit made from grapes.

The range turns on one choice. The food magazine Gourmed, after visiting the Raxa distillery, reported that the Tsililis family, distillers for three generations, makes two kinds of tsipouro, with or without aniseed. Pomace is distilled, the magazine explained, and botanicals such as aniseed or fennel can be added during distillation for their aroma and for the cloudiness the spirit takes on with water.

The family has also pushed tsipouro towards age. Tsililis told iefimerida.gr in 2025 that experiments with ageing in oak casks began in 1997, because he could not see why whisky, cognac and rum should have special editions and a grape spirit should not. The company calls Dark Cave its first deeply aged tsipouro: it was aged in French and American oak casks that had held red wine and finished for its last year in casks from Vinsanto. The same article showed an aged tsipouro named Agioneri, and described a lighter style aged for one year in older oak that gives little wood, so the spirit keeps a fresh character with spicy notes.

The process is described in the company’s own terms. Grapes are picked by hand, Tsililis said, and carried in crates to cold rooms; the juice goes to wine and the pomace, with a little must, ferments in chilled tanks for ten to fifteen days before distillation in steam-jacketed stills with a stirrer, followed by a column with eight stages of condensation.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Greek wine houses and spirits: Boutari, Kourtakis, Tsantali, Kir-Yianni, Plomari, Tsilili and Skinos. Wine and 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 restaurant list.

A wine or 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 wine or spirit is actually made 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 wine or spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still a family company, now with a second home in Tyrnavos.

K. Tsililis S.A. remains a family business. iefimerida.gr described Kostas Tsililis in October 2025 as the owner of the tsipouro that bears his name, and the company’s SEAOP profile lists its seat in Raxa, Trikala, with a branch in Athens. Tsililis told the site that the brand leads its category by the numbers.

Production is now spread across two parts of Thessaly. In the same feature, Tsililis showed the paper a new distillery in the Tyrnavos vine zone, which was due to open in the following months; the older Raxa unit, with a tasting room, remains. He said the company had worked closely with Tyrnavos growers since 1989, that the zone is dominated by the aromatic Muscat of Hamburg grape, that the new site can take in around seven million kilos of grapes, and that the family owns about 25 hectares of vineyards while most fruit comes from local growers.

Wine sits beside the spirit. Importers of the family’s Theopetra Estate wines date that estate to 1996 and place it near the Theopetra cave, close to Meteora. In 2013, iefimerida.gr reported, Kostas Tsililis began reviving the long-abandoned vineyard of the Great Meteoron monastery, below the rock at the western entrance to Meteora; it is farmed organically and yields red, white and rosé wines and the communion wine of the monastery.

The name needs a little care. Tyrnavos, where the new distillery stands, has its own tsipouro producers and its own protected name, Tsipouro of Tyrnavos, so Tsilili is not a Tyrnavos brand by origin; it was born in Raxa. Dekaraki, a Tyrnavos tsipouro, is a separate brand that the Plomari distillery created with the Vasdavanos family of Tyrnavos, Powergame.gr reported in 2021.

For a design guide, Tsilili shows how a family name and a regional category can turn a village drink into a bottled brand without inventing a new story. Compare Plomari, the Lesvos ouzo, and Ouzo 12, another Greek anise spirit. For this guide we use Muscat green, Meteora stone and cask brown with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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