Plum Crazy has its roots in a Transylvanian wedding, when one of us looked up from a pitcher of ţuică and said brightly and a little drunkenly: “This is actually good.”

It comes from a frozen Weihnachtsmarkt in Berlin, discussing Obstbrand (fruit brandy) with a German distiller, describing a lovely Hungarian pálinka we had tasted on a recent trip, and hearing him dismiss that country as the source only of apricot brandies, inferior and sweet.

It certainly comes from warm summer evenings around a terrace table in Transylvanian Sibiu, tipping glass after glass of locally made ţuică from unlabeled plastic bottles, talking politics and history and past adventures and scheming ways to give this spirit a foothold in the United States.

We have decided to do this ourselves. Part of this project is learning to distill. With luck, and money, we will join the burgeoning craft distilling movement with our own products before too many years are past.

But we are writers too, and we want better to understand the essence of a spirit that has captivated both our imaginations and our thirst. From this comes our book.

Our “plum belt” region — essentially the Carpathian basin and Northern Balkans — has for centuries been torn between empires, religions, national hatreds and cold-war ideologies. Atrocities have been committed in the name of freedom, self-determination and the recovery of long-past territories. Borders drawn by international commissions in Paris, Berlin or Vienna have routinely ignored or exacerbated local tensions.

In America, and in much of Western Europe, we know this region almost solely as a place of intractable strife. But it is vastly more: It is a fertile crossroads of cultures, the easternmost outpost of the historical West, shores across which which waves of Asian migrations have broken and receded, the birthplace of utopian hopes and dystopian realities, of art and poetry and literatures all but unknown in English-speaking lands.

Know what a people drinks, we argue, and you will know something of the people themselves. Plum brandy — made locally, drawn from the soil, used ritually to mark weddings and funerals and the welcome of friends — is ubiquitous across much of this region, and each people claims their own as unique. Understanding how this can be simultaneously true and false is a step toward understanding the nature of the region itself.

We are not historians, or linguists. But we are writers and travelers and drinkers (and aspiring distillers), and we hope to bring back stories and sights, smells and flavors, faces and experiences that will enrich our readers’ understanding of what this region is today.

We hope something of this — a lazy summer night with friends, examining a glass of shimmering spirit through clear glass; a pride in capturing the essence of a fruit, a moment, or a place and time — can be bottled and shared.