Péter Zwack came home after 40 years and bought his family's liqueur back from the state

The Zwack family had made Unicum, Hungary's herbal digestif, since the 19th century. Péter Zwack, born in Budapest in 1927, worked in the family distillery, but at the end of 1947 his father told him to leave as the communists closed in; the firm ended up in state hands. From exile he stayed in the trade, running wine and spirits importers in Connecticut, Chicago and New York, and from 1970 supervised production and international distribution of Zwack Unicum from Florence — and, as the Washington Post put it, helped safeguard the secret formula through the years of Nazi and Soviet occupation.

As communist Hungary began opening, Péter Zwack moved back in 1987–88, among the first exiled businessmen to return. In 1989 he founded a joint venture with the state-owned Budapest Liquor Company under the name Zwack Unicum Budapest, putting the family name back on legal production inside Hungary.

The decisive move came in the 1991 privatisation: with his partner Emil Underberg of the German Underberg family, via Peter Zwack & Consorten AG, he redeemed the family's property from the Hungarian state. Zwack Unicum was re-established as a family-controlled company, and Péter became chairman of the board.

The recovery outlasted him. In 1990 he even served as Hungary's ambassador to the United States — renouncing his American citizenship to do it. In 2008 his son Sándor Zwack, the sixth generation, took over the management, and the brand remains a Hungarian national drink and a family business.

The Zwack family regained the Unicum brand and distillery in the 1991 privatisation, run with Underberg, and Sándor Zwack took over as sixth generation in 2008.

The heir never let go of the asset: forty years in exile were spent working in the same industry, keeping the recipe and the trade knowledge alive.

He entered early, in 1987, before privatisation was formal, so the 1989 joint venture gave the family an operating base inside the state system.

The 1991 buyback was financed and legitimised by partnering with Underberg, a foreign family distiller, rather than attempting it alone.

Returning the firm to family hands preserved the brand's story — continuity that no state-owned successor could replicate.

A brand can outlive the state that seizes it — if an heir survives to claim it and will share control with a strong partner to afford the buyback.

Zwack Unicum grew into Hungary's leading spirits house and remained under family control. Péter Zwack stayed honorary president after Sándor took over in 2008, and died in 2012 at 85. Unicum is still produced in Budapest from the family recipe he protected through four decades of exile.