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In 1815 Ivan Smirnov founded the company I.A Smirnov & Family in Russia. The company leased a warehouse in the remains of the old Wine Courts of Moscow, which had been devastated by the French Army three years earlier. Here they began distilling liqueurs and vodka. The company was registered in 1818 and by 1827, enough income had been made to build a new distillery near the Iron Bridge over the Moskva River.
The demand for vodka spread courtesy of the soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars who had spent much time drinking in Western Europe. When Ivan died in 1873, the family was very wealthy and his son Pierre rebuilt the distillery and opened offices at 2 Piatnitskaya Street, a Moscow landmark that is still standing today.
By the end of 1899, the workforce numbered 2000, and the distillery was pouring out four million cases per year.
Pierre died in 1901, and the business passed on to his two sons, Nicolai and Vladimir Piotrovich Smirnov, both of whom had grown up in a world of privilege and they owned country estates and moved in exalted circles.
They became prime targets of the revolution when the communists seized power in 1917. Lenin took control of the distilleries and sentenced the brothers to death. Nicolai was executed, while Vladimir was tortured until Russia’s White Army took control of the prison and freed him. Leaving his millions behind, but taking his recipe for vodka, Vladimir fled to Poland and eventually to France, where he set up a new distillery.
In a country known for the finest cognac and wines in the world, Vladimir’s operation was on the brink of failure when in 1933 he met up with a fellow survivor of the revolution Rudolph Kunett who had emigrated to America in 1920. The Kunett family had been a supplier of spirits to Smirnoff in Moscow before the Revolution. In 1933 Vladimir sold Kunett the right to begin producing Smirnoff vodka in North America. However, the business in America was not as successful as Kunett had hoped. In 1938 Kunett couldn't afford to pay for the necessary sales licenses, and contacted John Gilbert Martin, president of G.E Heublein & Brothers purveyor of liquor and fine foods, who agreed to buy the rights to Smirnoff.
Martin was a known risk-taker, believing in products when nobody else did. During prohibition the company survived by successfully marketing A-One Steak Sauce. Martin gave Rudolph Kunett a job as salesman, and a 5% commission on every bottle he sold for the first 10 years. One of the first clients was a distributor in South Caroliner, who bought ten cases, shortly after another order came in for five hundred cases. The vodka was being shipped with corks marked ‘whiskey’ and distributed as ‘Smirnoff White Whiskey – No Smell, No Taste’.
By 1955 the cocktail craze had kicked in and Heublein was selling more than a million cases of Smirnoff vodka a year and despite competition from premium vodkas such as Absolut from Sweden, Finlandia from Finland and Stolichnaya from Russia, it is estimated that six bottles of Smirnoff are opened every second, and it is sold in over 150 countries around the world.
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