Region & History

Nemyriv lies on the Southern Bug, right in the heart of the landscape once known as Podolia and today part of the Vinnytsia Oblast. The town's name first appears in connection with vodka as early as 1752, but it wasn't until 1872 that it became a proper enterprise: Count Grigori Stroganov founded the region's largest distillery here.

His daughter, Princess Maria Shcherbatova, carried on the business and fundamentally changed the recipe. Instead of potatoes, she began distilling the vodka from wheat, the grain that thrives best on the black earth all around. The distillery soon supplied the tsarist court, and the name Nemyriv came to stand for quality far beyond Podolia.

Over the course of the 20th century, the estate operation grew into an industrial plant, and the plant later became the brand Nemiroff. Today it ranks among the largest vodka producers in the world, its bottles sit on shelves in more than 81 countries, and in airport duty-free it's among the three best-selling vodka brands anywhere.

On 24 February 2022, Russia's war of aggression reached Nemyriv, and Nemiroff had to halt production temporarily in the first days of the war. On 14 July of the same year, Russian missiles struck nearby Vinnytsia, killing more than twenty people, including children. The EU classified the attack as a war crime.

Nevertheless, the distillery in Nemyriv keeps working, and the wheat vodka from Podolia is still distilled just as Princess Shcherbatova began it more than a hundred and fifty years ago.