In 1996 I climbed on a train in Belgrade with no ticket and rode for free thanks to a bottle of plum brandy. It was, in a sense, my first lesson in Carpathian hospitality.

Jumping the train in Belgrade was an easy decision. A friend who was supposed to meet me there conveniently forgot and had left town; it was midnight and the station was filled with more shadows and lurkers then friendly faces; and I had no dollars, a handful of Turkish lira and some Bulgarian toilet paper, which at the time may have doubled for currency. I was stranded and panicked. So I snuck on the only train still idling in the station, one that was on its way to the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

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Much to say, but for now: We are sick with some uncivil stomach-bug, which first attacked our friend Grigo after a night of drinking in Sibiel, a little Carpathian village known for its glass icon museum and its local spirits, and has now moved to Aimee and I.

Grigo’s family friend Valerica, who serves as a guide at the museum, is the daughter of a family described by Grigo’s father as the “Johnny Walkers of Transylvania” — orchard-owners, who at one point made a prodigious amount of spirits. She does not drink herself, but as we stopped by the museum for directions to another village distiller’s home, she saw how pale Grigo had become, and told him that if he was sick, the best thing he could do for himself was to take a medicinal dose of plum brandy.

I am on my way to do this now.

The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.

-Ernest Renan, “What is a nation”

Can we draw inspiration from this? We are heading to Romania and Hungary, to drink and study ţuică and pálinka, spirits which though different in the eyes of Hungarians and Romanians are all but indistinguishable from the perspective of outsiders and chemists.

This shared love is of course not enough to define  a nation in any geopolitical sense, particularly across languages and borders that remain controversial. These are two very different countries, with very different histories, and the things they have forgotten are correspondingly varied, perhaps even mirror-images of one another.

But we are seeking the borderless nation of brandy-drinkers and brandy-makers, people who do have these spirits in common, and who perhaps have all forgotten a bit of last night, or their own pain, or, for a few hours, the fact that friends and lovers and beautiful moments are all as transient as the perfect shape of a September plum.

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent
Pour partir; coeurs légers, semblables aux ballons,
De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s’écartent,
Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours: Allons!
“Le Voyage,” Charles Baudelaire

We’ve spent the past few weeks scouring the Web and our ever-growing stacks of history and culture books to assemble what we feel (hope?) will be the best cross-section of palinka culture in Hungary — from producers to retailers to lovers to bloggers to, well, whomever wants to sit down and yap with us for a bit over a glass or two.  In a language we can understand, hopefully.  Mi nem beszélnek magyarul.

Here’s the map so far.  We’re especially excited about visiting Agardi, which makes some of the finest palinka we’ve tasted; there’s a curious palinka museum to the east of Budapest attached to a brewery that might prove interesting; and the list of palinka “knights” (complete with Middle Age-inspired outfits and pastoral gatherings and castles) surprisingly seems to grow.

View Plum Crazy: Hungary 2010 in a larger map

Our timing is good, too; one of the recently elected government’s campaign promises was to lift the ban on home distilling.  This promise made it into Fidesz’ economic plan, but there’s plenty of turmoil and controversy (and the legislative influence of the EU).  Yet it remains to be seen whether bread and circuses (or palinka and ethnic baiting) will keep Hungarians distracted from other, more pressing, issues.  There will be no shortage of things to talk about while at the bar…

Rézangyal, one of the most prominent high-end palinkas in Hungary, isn’t a producer per se. Rather, they buy their products from a variety of other producers, tasting, blending and bottling what they consider to be among the top-quality brandies available. The company is part of a move in Hungary to bring palinka up market, competing on quality, tradition and mystique with drinks like scotch or top-shelf vodka. Naturally we’re fans.

We first tasted their products a few years ago on a trip to Budapest, late on a lazy summer café evening, at a waitress’ recommendation. A plum and a honey-based brandy, both outstanding. We brought home a bottle of the plum, long since gone, but a generous friend has now procured a new bottle of the Barrique Plum for us.

Our thoughts: On first pour, and early sip, there is a strong hint of green herb, like a wet, crushed mint or catnip. This loosens over a few minutes into a blend of well-defined ripe plum and the toasted caramel of the barrel. Though the two flavors are distinct, we noted a strong spicy character closest to cloves, as well as a pleasant sweetness that reminded me of the Smarties candies of my childhood. Very pleasant, very smooth, although I found the barrel flavor a bit overpowering. I’d love to taste the same batch or blend without nearly so much wood.

Unfortunately, the company has stopped putting the original producer or producers’ name on the bottle (our first bottle listed the original distiller, and Rézangyal as the bottler.) As a geek, I’d love to know these things. But even with the slight over-wooded flavor, this bottle – like everything I’ve tasted with this label – comes highly recommended.

Here is a Google map of Hungary with a few dozen palinka producers scattered across it. These seem to be the major commercial (in the broadest sense of the word) distilleries, ranging from extreme artisans such as Agárdi to large-scale operations such as Arany Kapu (Golden Gate) We may be doing this for other countries as well, if we can find the Internet resources to support the work.

If anybody knows of producers we’ve missed, let us know.

View Palinka Distilleries in a larger map

In Southern German regions, it’s not uncommon to see people drinking beer for breakfast. In parts of Hungary, pálinka is, or has been, the breakfast of the dawning day – the “coffee of the poor,” as it was evidently termed by some in the early 1900s.

You see this retained in language, in the expression: Pálinkás jó reggelt!, which translates variously as “A pálinka good morning,” or “Good morning with pálinka!”

Naturally, there are explanations for this early, to American palates nearly inconceivable practice. Balázs quotes a handful of folk sayings:

In the morning, wine sleeps and shouldn’t be woken, so pálinka must be drunk.

or alternately:

Before wine, pálinka, then a bit of sausage, just so the coffee won’t hurt later.

A confession: When visiting a friend for a Transylvanian wedding, we were on hand for the arrival of a close Hungarian friend of the groom and groom’s brother. Maybe 10 in the morning. We gathered underneath the shade of the walnut tree to welcome him, and the bottle of brandy came out, glasses were filled, and the friend’s arrival was toasted. We smiled, and I surreptitiously poured the spirits into the grass.

But I was young. Today I would have wished them a Pálinkás jó reggelt! and let the wine sleep in a little longer.

Unexpected links to the familiar, exhumed from the past. According to Claudio Magris’ Danube, a prominent Hungarian diplomat telegrammed Béla Kun, the newly installed Communist leader of a newly independent Hungary, on May 15, 1919, with the following suggestion:

“Propose requesting American Protectorate of Hungary and if possible declare Hungary a State of the American Union stop.”

Kun’s reply, two days later, in French: “Nous avons reçu votre dépêche,” which Magris translates as a laconic “Communication noted.”

The socialist Kun was never likely to take his aristocratic negotiator’s advice. He was rather desperate for support from Lenin’s Russia, which was itself bogged down in civil war. To win public support for his then two-month-old government, Kun turned instead to winning back lost territory.

A key focus was Transylvania, previously a province of Hungary, but which held a Romanian ethnic majority. The Romanian army had already occupied much of the territory, leading in part to the resignation of Hungary’s government and Kun’s rise to power. On June 28, a few days after Baron Szilassy pleaded with Kun to cast his lot with the Americans, the Western powers officially awarded Transylvania to Romania as a part of the Treaty of Versailles.

Romanian troops enter Budapest

In reality, the treaty was premature. Hungarian and Romanian forces were still at war. But not for long – Kun’s military collapsed after only few months, and by early August, Romanian forces had occupied Budapest, and Kun himself had fled to the young Soviet Union (where he would ultimately be killed in a Stalinist purge).

Better to have sought American statehood? In a region where political certainties were collapsing along with an empire rooted far deeper in history than were America’s own 150 years of statehood, crazier ideas were being floated.

A vocal segment of today’s right-wing revival in Hungary wants Transylvania and the rest of the former “Greater Hungary” back. It isn’t likely to happen, but it will make relations with Romania and Slovakia tense as long as the right wing is in power.

It’s worth noting that common ground does exist, however. A scholar of pálinka in Hungary, Géza Balázs, notes that the word for the country’s national liquor actually comes from the Slovakian language. And in Romania too, or at least Transylvania, plum spirits are sometimes called pălincă as well as tuica.

Koval's Kothe-designed still

Chicago’s Koval Distillery is tucked into a warehouse space next to a microbrewery, one of those happy accidents of location that makes both businesses’ lives easier, and seems to be a fairly common story among craft distillers. Robert and Sonat Birnecker started the business just a few years ago, the second craft distiller in the state (after the excellent North Shore Distillery), and are building it into something unique even among the idiosyncratic world of craft distilling.

Their products, for a start, are strikingly unique. They lead with a range of 100% single-grain white whiskeys – Rye, Wheat, Oat, Spelt and Millet – most of which are all but unknown in the States as grist for distillation. They make a pear brandy similar to an Austrian classic, a rye-based vodka, a bierbrand, and a range of liquors infused with flavors like fresh ginger, rose hips, coffee and jasmine. Everything is rigorously organic, down to the processing of the staves in the custom-made barrels they’re using to age their whiskey.

They’re also the U.S. representatives of Kothe Distillationstechnik, one of the most prominent still-makers in Germany, and twice a year or more Robert and Sonat offer classes aimed at helping people start and run a craft distillery.

We’re now a few weeks back from their spring session, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. We had chosen this class because of its focus on business and legal aspects, in addition to simple hands-on distilling time. And they delivered, with guest speaker on insurance, trademark law, federal licensing (you’re going to screw it up, but don’t worry — just don’t try to cheat), distribution, and even barrel-making.

Robert and Sonat talked about their own choices: locating the business in Chicago, selecting raw ingredients and developing products, choosing a distributor rather than self-distributing, how to make sure your neighbors don’t make the business impossible to run. The insanely knowledgeable Klaus Hagmann of Kothe led the class through the chemistry of fermentation and the physical aspects of still design and operation.

Feeding flour into the mash tank

All this was in addition to the making of a wheat-whiskey mash, and the distillation of another run of the wheat whiskey.

A big reality-check, in short. This is a difficult business. And a snowballing one—around the country, dozens or maybe scores of new craft distilleries are being born. It’s not clear that there is room for them al in the market, but I think this is a matter of time. The demand is not yet there, because people don’t know of their existence. We did a small sample of cocktail- and liquor-friendly bars while travelling, and found craft distillery products in only a few. That will grow, as microbrewing did; give it five years, and people will know to ask for Koval’s Chicago Rye or House Spirits’ Aviation Gin by name.

It will be a while before we get to the point of actually setting up a commercial operation. The book comes first, as part of our campaign to make fruit brandies A Thing in America. But until then, a big thanks to Robert and Sonat and Klaus for helping us and dozens of other get started in an inspiring way.

From the father of a good friend: “Two things will never cross the Carpathians: Honor and plum brandy.”