Multiplicity among field and cluster stars is ubiquitous. The properties of binary stars are therefore fundamental to understand how stars were formed and how they evolve. Interaction processes between components may lead to complex outcomes like chemically peculiar stars, stripped stars, transients and merger events. Binaries are easily identified through radial velocity variations measured in spectroscopy. Large spectroscopic surveys, like the Gaia-ESO survey (GES), provide high accuracy radial velocities and chemical abundances for hundreds of thousands of stars. Among them, spectroscopic multiple stellar systems (spectroscopic binaries with one ore more visible components: SBn, with n ≥ 1) deserve special investigation since the determined radial velocities and chemical abundances could be potentially affected by multiplicity. In this talk, I will summarize the findings obtained in the GES in terms of stellar multiplicity and the statistical properties of binary stars and present perspective in the context of other large spectroscopic surveys.