The story
From the Venetan name Valona of the now Albanian city Vlorë around which it grows, unlike in Italy. One of the principal sources of tannin in the English-speaking world in the late 19th century, largely imported from the Ottoman Empire, with Smyrna being the main trading centre for it, whence to Trieste it passed the first time in 1842 to reach the Austro-Hungarian leather industry and become popular in Germany only by the 1880s.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.