So I wanted to try the whole guest post business on this fair website, and decided to go for something with local, well… flavour, if you will. A bit on the always popular booze with a little bit of commentary on government. And here it is.

Romanians enjoy the local hooch, to the surprise of nobody, which some translate plum brandy (although brandy comes from wine, but you can have plum wine as well, I suppose), but locals call it ţuica (the diacritic t is actually a pronounced like the ending of ants) and variations thereof are fairly common round the east of Europe and variously called palinka, slivovitz, or rakia. You get the idea.

Tuica Still

Like many a Romanian, I occasionally partake of the stuff, though my taste generally goes for Islay malts. And I can assure you, fellow libertarians, that it is proper moonshine made in an unlicensed still with no business of the government in the making. Some of the more skittish western folk think this dangerous or unwise. It is not. I have yet to know people having trouble from this. More often, cheap knockoff vodka causes issue, but tuica makers often are skilled and proud of their craft. Is there no bad stuff? Of course there is, but not if you know the people making it or what to buy.

Making decent plum moonshine is surprisingly easy, in fact. My grandma used to make some on a small still on the stove in a small Bucharest apartment kitchen. My parents occasionally make some on a small still in their yard. I took part in some of that myself, and I buy it from people who make larger quantities. It’s about 5 of your American dollar per litre (yes, litre, like civilised folk measure things).

My grandfather was from the Pitesti region of Romania, one of the famous tuica producing regions. My family still has some land there with a couple hundred or so plum trees, hence the predilection of my family to make tuica. When we visit the area in autumn, we pick some of the plums and distill them, more for the sake of it really, based on the effort it would be easier just to buy.

This region produces a lower alcoholic version, which many prefer, because you can drink a higher quantity of liquid for the same drunkenness level. People spend time talking and drinking, so the glasses add up. In Transylvania or Moldova, people are partial to 40, 50, or sometimes even 60 abv. But I usually drink the 25 – 30 abv stuff from Pitesti, mostly mulled in winter (with a bit of sugar, pepper, cinnamon, and whatever else you want to throw in it).

Plums. Obviously

My grandpa’s family had a bigger plum orchard before the glorious regime of the proletariat. They also had a pub in the city of Pitesti. Those days, most common folk that drank in pubs drank tuica as their spirit of choice or country wine. Other spirits were for the fancy people with high incomes, and beer was not as common as today. My grandfather’s pub sold their own tuica and barter wine.

Many poor people these days drink cheap, counterfeit plonk called “whiskey like alcoholic beverage,” or “tequila flavour beverage,” or just grain alcohol, cheap vodka, and there are people who blame this for bad health and alcoholism. They speak of the good old days when people drank tuica and wine and were more healthy, although this has a tinge of nostalgia for Merry Old Romania and bucolic fantasy.

There was not much wine being made in the immediate region, but reasonably close were some wine regions. So every autumn, the family would load the oxcarts (trucks were more expensive and the roads not great in 30s Romania) with barrels of tuica and started slowly for the wine areas, and bartered it for wine. The wine areas themselves made a cheaper moonshine from pomace left over from wine grapes, but most preferred the plum stuff.

The reason Pitesti is a tuica area, well one of the reasons besides people drinking lots, is the fact that it is a high plain or low plateau that is fairly dry and has permeable rock strata, so the water aquifer is pretty deep. That and poor soil meant agriculture was not efficient for many crops. But plum trees, for some reason, thrived in the area. That worked from time immemorial (which is anything more than 100 years give or take) until the great planned economy of Mr. Ceausescu kicked in.

You see the area, on maps at least, is sometimes called the high plains of Pitesti. And when communist officials read a map they thought, like all reasonable people would think, plain means growing wheat. And as such, after collectivisation of the land into the fabulous agricultural cooperatives, a lot of plum trees were taken out in order to plant wheat. As the savvy reader may imagine based on the story, wheat did not exactly thrive there. But communists were nothing if not perseverant in their folly. So it went on for a while. This is one of those situations where the good ideas of communism were improperly applied, or something.

Look, if you can’t tell the difference between plum blossoms and cherry blossoms…

After regime change, communism was replaced with the faux social-democratic-kleptocracy that is characteristic of the present. The plum trees were replanted and tuica came back; although it never fully left, just decreased in quantity and quality. As you could not find much in stores, there was quite the demand for alcohol during communism. There were stories of drinking medicinal alcohol – filtered in various ways to get rid of the vivid blue colouring and eventual toxic components. A bottle of imported Whiskey was better than money. Much better.

After grandpa got the land back, he replanted plum trees. He was living in Bucharest by then, and never did much with the orchard, so I think it was more nostalgia than anything else. After he died, the orchard was less maintained by us Bucharest dwellers, we just payed a local to do some basic maintenance. But I still have a couple of hundred “family” plum trees somewhere, should I choose to ditch the day job and get in the tuica making business. I can then smuggle it in the US, and sell it to make my fortune.