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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

It looks like a made-up thing, because over here in Romania we (meaning the people in the countryside) mostly drink home-made “palinca” (so basically the same thing as the Hungarians) and what we call “tzuica” (a sort of plum brandy). The common people who live in the urban area mostly drink very cheep beer (the kind of beer that you can purchase in 2.5l plastic bottles) and some poorer people drink a thing that is pretty close to rubbing alcohol.

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> some poorer people drink a thing that is pretty close to medicinal alcohol.

Or poor Romanians drink very cheap spirits produced by the Prodvinalco company, whose ingredient labels are always good for a laugh.

For example, on a bottle showing a pirate that might lead consumers to expect real rum, one finds in small print "Beverage made from alcohol of agricultural origin with rum flavouring". That is, it’s pure grain alcohol with presumably just an eyedropper’s worth of some kind of rum essence.

If you buy Captain Morgan's in the US, you get the same thing, industrially produced ethanol flavoured with rum essence. That's what "Bottled and finished in CA" means.

At least Romania has more honest labeling.

Do you have a source for this?

Captain Morgan, as we're talking about them, have a bunch of different products. Some are 100% Jamaican rum, and they say so on the bottle.

Their biggest seller though, Original Spiced Gold is according to themselves "a blend of rum and other spirits".

"Other spirits" is an industry euphemism for Grain Neutral Spirits, i.e. industrial alcohol produced using the cheapest base and distilled to 95%, which is something you then buy in bulk. Take a look at these guys, for example: https://ultrapure-usa.com/grain-neutral-spirits-options-sign...

Or take a look at this page: https://ultrapure-usa.com/services-2/spirits-brand-owners/ Want to launch a Gin company? Rum? Whisky? They're experts at white-labeling!

Yes, you have to read between the lines to understand how this works, because none of the large alcohol brands wants consumers to know how their products are actually made, it's all obscured by deceptive labeling.

Also, at the end of the day, ethanol is ethanol. The difference between Captain Morgan's Original Spiced Gold and actual Jamaican rum is like the difference between synthetic diamonds and real diamonds. Yes, both are 100% carbon in a diamond lattice with the exact same refraction index and hardness and properties. They sparkle the same, they look the same, only experts can tell the difference, but a lot of people still care about the difference.

> They sparkle the same, they look the same, only experts can tell the difference, but a lot of people still care about the difference.

If it’s for mixing with soda or Red Bull with lots of sugar sure the difference might not be noticeable (especially for grain based spirits). But if you drink for example a brandy like Cognac (which is distilled wine) you’ll have a hard time recreating it with artificial flavors.

> But if you drink for example a brandy like Cognac (which is distilled wine) you’ll have a hard time recreating it with artificial flavors.

There is already "cognac flavoring" that can be added to the cheap spirits that I mentioned in my post above. (It is also used for candies.) Few will notice the difference between low-end cognac and the imitation cognac.

Also, the ethanol producer I linked above have options so that you can buy "cognac base" by the truckload, that gives you actual distilled wine, not just industrial alcohol. It's just as bland and neutral as possible so that you, the buyer, can flavour it and pass it off as your own cognac.

There's generally more to a spirit than water and ethanol.

Brandy is made from wine, vodka is made from potatoes or grain. The one time I went to Romania I was given a lot of homemade brandy with fruit, all of which appeared to have been distilled from Moscato wine and then having fruit added. That's definitely not vodka.

Not necessarily and it depends on the region. If it's a wine region, yes, they usually make it from distilled wine. Otherwise it's made from fruit. Or both. For instance after one squeezes the grapes for wine, the leftover pulp and skin is used to make grape brandy (tescovina). Also leftover wine from filtering or from a barrel that was left less than half empty for a longer period and the wine oxydized is distilled to make wine brandy (vinars). They taste differently and are called differently. Tescovina has a more fruity flavour, while vinars tastes like pure alcohol with a mild grape skin or seed flavour. Other brandies in other regions are made mostly from fruit, either distilled once (rachiu, tuica) or twice (palinca) depending on the region. Usually in the north you have double distillation (like in Hungary) and in the south they distill it only once (like in Greece). And then of course there's grain alcohol but that's almost never home made but rather industrially produced. It's used to produce home made sweet fruit brandies from sour cherries or wild berries.

Listen to this guy, he speaks the truth :)

Are Vinars sounds a lot like Grappa, is that right?

Dunno about grappa, but vinars is distilled wine which is either consumed directly or used to make cognac by aging it in oak casks or with oak splinters and maybe adding some additional ingredients such as vanilla, black tea or Sambucus flower infusion. It really depends on the producer and the recipe, but home made cognac is made like that. Each producer obviously has their own recipe. The best I've had was just aged in an oak barrel for 15y. It had a mild amberish colour. The ones made with splinters or wood residue have a too pronounced oak taste.

Yes, or a kind of cognac -- also "vinars" comes from "vin ars", literally meaning "burnt wine", possibly a mirror translation of "Weinbrand" in german or transylvanian saxon dialects.

> The one time I went to Romania I was given a lot of homemade brandy with fruit, all of which appeared to have been distilled from Moscato wine and then having fruit added.

You are either wrong about this, or you were served something very unusual. Brandy in Romania is overwhelmingly produced solely from fruit, with no role for wine at all. I have witnessed the production process myself while staying in the countryside.

All I can say is that my girlfriend's father made the brandy from Moscato, and his parents made the same thing, and claimed it was made that way since before the Communists showed up.

I saw the fruit orchard and the vineyard.

However, you're missing the point as it relates to this discussion. Fruit brandy made from fruit is like wine, not vodka.

If you want to fight to the death that my girlfriend's parents and great-grandparents are atypical, that's totally fine.

There is a tradition within Romania of making distilled spirits from wine (vinars), but as I said, that is a very niche product and you just seem to have happened to run into it. Most of the country distills their brandy purely from fruit. In a lot of the villages that produce Romanian fruit brandy, grapes are not even grown by any of the families at all.

Here is a guess: It was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomace_brandy , törkölypálinka in Hungarian, created from the leftover fruit pulp after pressing the grapes for wine. That's what Italians call grappa. The other possibility is distilled grape juice, that is brandy, but brandy is much less common in Eastern Europe, they prefer to turn their grape juice into wine.

I just can't see how distilling mashed-up plums/pears/quince/apricot, in a still - mashed up for the single purpose of being distilled in that still - can be considered more similar to fermenting grape juice, than it is to distilling other things in a still (even potatoes). Hence my comment.

I don't know where your girlfriend's father is from, I'm guessing from behind the iron curtain somewhere based on the comment about the Communists. I'm sure he made good brandy from moscato. However rakija is not made from wine nor does it have anything to do with it culturally from a consumption standpoint.

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