Ruminsky

Appleton Estate 50 Year Old Rum (2012)

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May 162017
 

Rumaniacs Review #041 | 0441

Note: The initial full length review can be found in the main reviews section.

Everyone knows about the 50 year old rum which Appleton pushed out the door a few years ago. Not only because of the age, which they touted as “the oldest rum ever” even though that was patently untrue, but because of the stratospheric price, which even now hovers around the US$4500 mark (give or take). I’m not sure if they still make it — it was specifically commissioned for Jamaica’s 50th anniversary of Independence in 1962, so I suspect it was an 800-bottle one-off halo-issue — but that price alone would make many take a really jaundiced view of the thing. To their detriment, I believe, because having tasted it five times now, I can say with some assurance that it is still one of the very best rums Appleton ever made.

Colour – Mahogany with red tints

Strength – 45%

Nose – The smell opens the vault of my memories, of Jamaica, of the stately progression of other Appletons rums over the years, of the times I tried it before. Initial notes of glue, fading fast; then honey (I always remember the honey), eucalyptus oil, toffee, caramel, rich milk chocolate with rye bread and cream cheese, developing slowly into luscious candied oranges, molasses and burnt sugar. Some of that vegetable soup I noted from the 20 year old ceramic jug is here as well, much subdued. What woodiness that exists is amazingly well controlled for something this old (a problem the 30 year old had).

Palate – The dark richness purrs down the throat in a sort of warm, pleasant heat. Burnt brown sugar and wek molasses, caramel, toffee, nougat and nutty toblerone chocolate, a flirt of coffee. More fruits emerge than the nose had hinted at, and provide a pleasing contrast to the more creamy, musky flavours: grapes, bananas, apricots, pineapples. Then cinnamon, more honey, some cheese. Oakiness again well handled, and a sort of leather and smoke brings up the rear. I sometimes wonder how this would taste at 55%, but even at 45%, the rum is so very very good.

Finish – Medium long, a fitting close to the proceedings. Mostly bananas, molasses, a little pineapple, plus a last dollop of caramel. And honey.

Thoughts – Still a wonderful rum to sip and savour. Sadly, too expensive for most. Those who can afford a whole bottle are unlikely to be into the rum world as much as we are, but whoever has it, I hope they’re sharing…generously.

(89/100)

The other Rumaniacs have also written about the rum, and their reviews are in the usual spot.

Appleton Reserve 20 Year Old Rum (Ceramic Jug)(1960s/1970s)

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May 152017
 

Rumaniacs Review #040 | 0440

As with the 12 year old ceramic jug, I don’t think that Appleton is exaggerating in the slightest when they call this a “Rare Old Jamaican Rum,” – at the time it was issued in the 1960s or 1970s they might have been hyping the product a tad, but now? Not likely. Still, you can actually find it if you’re prepared to pay Masters of Malt, who name this a 1970s era rum, the £700 it costs. And that’s more than the Longpond 1941 fetches these days. I must confess that for an aged artifact bottled (or “jugged”) at a mouth-watering, drool-worthy twenty years old, I’m tempted. Consider too – at that age, it means at the very latest it had to have been distilled in 1959, and very likely earlier than that, and what lover of historical rums wouldn’t want to try that?

Colour – Amber

Strength – 43%

Nose – Pure tamed Jamaican, with elements of the profile being showcased, but not strong or violent enough to put one off…a Trenchtown Rasta in a Savile Row suit, if you will. Rolling waves of salt and sweet, bananas, pineapple, chocolate and coffee, with caramel and toffee hastening to catch up from the rear. Some tobacco and smoke, a touch of vanilla, honey, anise, and very strong black tea. There’s a persistent — if faint — background odour of vegetable soup in here, both the veg and the soya. Really.

Palate – More of that dialled down bad boy attitude, nicely integrated into a profile that starts with “dirt”. By which I mean a sort of loamy, earthy, vegetable taste (far from unpleasant, I hasten to add), rye bread, cumin, garam massala, molasses, and oh, a lovely clear line of florals and citrus. Did I mention the vegetable soup? All wrapped up in a bow with the usual dessert menu of salted caramel and vanilla ice cream. And as an aside, it’s quite rich and intense…It may be jugged at 43% but it sure feels more powerful than that.

Finish – Falls down here after the high point of tasting it. It just fades too damn quick, and for some inexplicable reason, the wood starts to take on an unhealthy dominance. Salted caramel, brine, olives,, breakfast and cooking spices, and a twist of licorice. All very faint and too watered down.

Thoughts – It’s actually very different from the younger Appletons, the 12 year old jug, or the older 21 year old. Points of greatness are unfortunately ameliorated by weakness and an increasing lack of balance over the hours spent comparing it to all the others. In short, somewhat of a Shakespearean tragedy — potential and hubris being brought low by inherent flaws. Though even with all that, it leaves me somewhere closer to praising the rum than coming to bury it.

(86/100)

Other Rumaniacs reviews of this rum can be found on the website, here. Note that Serge was enthralled with it, while Marco was much more disapproving.

Banks DIH XM Supreme 15 Year Old Rum – Review

 2 Responses »
May 142017
 

#364

Until the release of the XM Golden Jubilee 20 year old rum in May 2016 for the occasion of Guyana’s 50th anniversary of independence, the jewel in the crown of Banks DIH’s XM line was the fifteen year old. Over the last five years or so it suffered, in my all-seeing rearview-mirror opinion, by simply following the party line, being bottled without regard for the emerging trend of stronger rums in the minds of the tasting public, and also perhaps from being a indeterminate, mostly column-still blend without a really good barrel strategy. This relegated it to being an outlier in an increasingly crowded and competitive field; and by eschewing any one point of uniqueness that would make it stand apart (finishing, single barrel, cask strength, a singular taste…that kind of thing), it has slumbered in a sort of quiet corner reserved for also-rans – Guyanese worldwide know of it, but few others do and it sure doesn’t make any waves internationally, in spite of its age.

Which is something of a shame, because setting aside personal preferences, it’s quite a good rum that could use a good dose of aggressive marketing and festival-circuit promotion. The very first note I wrote down in my tasting book as I was nosing the Supreme, was “Impressive”. It began with aromas of acetone and glue and furniture polish before giving way to very soft notes of dark dried fruit (raisins and plums), before segueing over into the territory of vanilla, caramel and nougat. What little tartness of the fruit that existed, was kept way back, vaguely sensed but not directly experienced, which to my way of thinking is a very good reason to bump up the ABV not just one notch, but several. Still, it was impressive, and for a 40% rum to exhibit such discernible richness was a pleasant surprise.

The palate, warm and eminently sippable, led off with the fruit basket: cherries, raisins, apricots and very ripe peaches. There were a few hint of bananas and white guavas, though without exhibiting any kind of overbearing sweetness, and the overall fruity tastes blended well with the restrained influence of burnt sugar, toffee, caramel, vanilla…all the usual attendant hits. There was a sort of jammy profile here, quite pleasing, and some very faint molasses hanging around unobtrusively in the background. It all led to a short and pleasant finish, mostly dates, caramel, vanilla, a bit briny in nature and not at all a tropical smorgasbord

So. The XM 15 is still somewhat generic in nature, but a level up from the 12 year old, and definitely better than the 10 year old. It’s more subtle, a little richer, yet still had much of that laid back profile that simply did not (or could not) strain too much or escape the clutches of its standard ABV. Still, leaving these two points aside, the one major — and perhaps surprising — drawback of the Supreme 15 year old is simply that, good as it is, it remains too similar to the Special 12 year old. I tried all the Banks rums together with a bunch of other forty percenters, and it really was difficult to tell these two apart. So for an average drinking man who’s looking for an aged living room powered rum that won’t incur the wife’s ire, the step up in quality from the 12 to the 15 is slight enough to not make the 15 a better investment outside of bragging rights. It’s a good rum to buy if you have the coin, but don’t look for a quantum leap to the stratosphere if you already have the ten or twelve year olds in stock.

(84.5/100)

Other notes

  • Banks DIH informed me that not only was the North American market being more aggressively targeted in 2017, but cask strength and even single-barrel rums would be issued as part of the range in the future. The majority of the range would continue to be blends, and the sourcing of raw rum stock from Trinidad and Barbados would continue (see the 12 year old review for some notes on the matter)
  • The Jubilee 20 year old (my age statement, not theirs) has components of the blend that are up to 50 years old.

Wray & Nephew Private Stock (1970s)

 3 Responses »
May 132017
 

Rumaniacs Review #039 | 0439

A rum like this makes me want to rend my robes and gnash my teeth with frustration because there’s no information available about it aside from what’s on the label, and that’s hardly very much. Still, it’s Jamaican, it’s a J. Wray (Appleton) and it’s from the 1970s and that alone makes it interesting. Imported by another one of those enterprising Italian concerns, age unknown. From the colour I can only hope it was a real oldie.

Colour – Dark red-brown

Strength – 43%

Nose – “Dirty” might be the est way to describe the nose. I’ve mentioned “rotting bananas and veggies” before in a review once or twice, and here it’s real. Quite intense for a standard proof drink – wine, bitter chocolate and black rye bread. Then molasses and bananas and a lot of compost (wet leaves in a pile) and a lot of fruit way past their sell-by date. Oh, and anise, strong black tea and some smoky, leathery aromas backing things up. Fantastic nose, really.

Palate – Smoothens out and is less aggressively crazy as the nose, though still quite assertive, luscious and rich. Molasses, caramel and dark fruits (prunes, plums, stewed apples, raisins) with the off notes held much more in check. Then chocolate, black tea and some citrus oil, a flirt of sugar cane juice and the bitterness of some oak. Some spices noticeable here or there, but nothing as definitive as the nose had suggested.

Finish – Short and easy, mostly caramel, wood chips, more tea, plums, a little brine and a last hint of veggies in teriyaki, odd as that might sound.

Thoughts – I really liked this rum, which didn’t present itself as an Appleton, but more like a unique Jamaican carving out its own flavour map. I seriously doubt it’ll ever be available outside a collector’s shelves, or perhaps on an auction site somewhere, but if it can be found I think it’s worth picking up, both for its history and its taste.

(85/100)

Appleton Reserve 12 Year Old Jamaican Rum (Ceramic Jug)(1960s/1970s)

 2 Responses »
May 112017
 

Rumaniacs Review #038 | 0438

A “Rare Old Jamaican Rum” the ceramic jug says, and I believe it. In all my travels around the world, I’ve never seen this kind of thing for sale (and buying beer in a glass jar at a kiosk in the Russian Far East don’t count). We’re living through an enormous upswell of interest in rums, with new indies and new bottlers popping up every time we turn around…but stuff like this shows us that even back in the day, there was some amazingly well-presented juice floating around. Here, cool factor is off the chart.

As for the rum? Very nice indeed. Aged in the tropics (of course – where else would Appleton be ageing its stock?) and better than both the other 12 year old we looked a the other day, and the modern one.

Colour – Amber

Strength – 43%

Nose – Initial attack is as dusty and dry as a mortician’s voice (and he’s wearing well polished old leather shoes, that’s there too). Oily, vaguely like cigarette tar (not my favourite smell). Coffee and chocolate, citrus rind, and then a nice procession of tart ripe fruits…mangoes and red guavas. Some saltiness and dates and grapes, not much funk action as far as I could tell.

Palate – Some bitterness of unsweetened black choclate starts things off, hot salt caramel over a coffee cake (same kind of dessert taste I got on the last 12 year old).Wood shavings, some more leather, more cigarette smoke, and then the fruits timidly emerge – citrus mostly, also bananas (barely), and a dash of breakfast spices, nothing overbearing.

Finish – Weak point of the experience, after the above-average smell and taste. Dry, sawdust (the mortician is back, shoes squeaking), leather, light chocolate, caramel, and the barest hint of the fruits retreating. Not impressed here, sorry.

Thoughts – It’s better than many other, more recent Appletons of various names (like “Extra”, “Reserve”, “Legacy”, “Private stock” and so on) and those of younger ages, beats out the other twelves that have been tried…but not by leaps and bounds. It’s not a furious game-changer. It sort of edges past them as if ashamed to be seen at all. A good rum, and I liked it, but it does leave me puzzled too – because I thought it could have been better and didn’t understand why it wasn’t.

(84/100)

Some interesting and divergent perspectives on this one, from other members of the Rumaniacs. You can check out their opinions in the usual spot.

Banks DIH XM Special 12 Year Old Rum – Review

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May 102017
 

Quite a good rum, which unfortunately fails to carve out a distinctive Guyanese profile of its own.

#363

When one thinks of Demerara rums, Guyana and DDL immediately spring to mind. That company has so dominated the global rum scene for such rums in the past two decades that it may come as a surprise to many that it is not the sole maker of such products, nor the only inheritor to the Guyana rum moniker, and in fact, is somewhat of a late arrival. Before it was consolidated from the distilleries that were once the property of Bookers McConnell and Sandbach Parker, Banks DIH was already there, making the good stuff since the 1930s, with XM being noted as the #1 rum in British Guiana as far back as 1959.

The problem for Banks (where rums are concerned) was and remains twofold: rum is actually a small part of its overall business (partly because they have no still of their own) and it also does not possess the right to use the “Demerara” appellation for its XM line – DDL fought and won a bitterly contested court case for that prize – and therefore not only is XM rum less well known, but it’s also less well marketed, and to add insult to injury, is often confused with Banks 5-island and 7-island rums from the UK. Not the best way to get your hooch to grab the brass ring now, is it?

Banks has always been a blender, never a distiller. Until the late 1990s they bought raw rum stock from the various estates around the Guyana and blended that into their signature XM line; but once DDL consolidated all the stills in the country into their headquarters at Diamond estate, they ceased providing any. Banks therefore has, for the last twenty years or so, sourced their rum stock from Barbados (FourSquare)and Trinidad (Angostura) and continued to blend them and age them in Guyana, which goes a long way to explaining why the XM I grew up with is no longer the same rum as what is on sale now. So it’s not as if Banks doesn’t want to make Guyanese rums – it’s that they can’t, and that also goes some way to explaining the smaller footprint they have, both in the company’s overall operations, and the world at large. (For a more in-depth look at Banks, see the company bio, written in February 2018)

Digressions aside, the rum, now. The 12 year old — bought and tasted alongside the 10 YO and 15 YO last year — adhered to the company philosophy of making blended rum, and for better or worse, this made it present something of a generic profile…and for the reasons explained above, nothing here screamed “Guyana” in the way the El Dorado line does, which says a lot of how DDL’s (and all the other independent bottlers’) products have colonized our mental tasting map of the entire country, for good or ill.

To illustrate the point: nosing the amber 40% spirit gave up warm smells were of white toblerone, chocolate, toffee and some lemon rind. The whole aroma reminded me of a very nice dessert my son The Little Caner can’t get enough of: caramel drizzled over The Great Wall of Chocolate (don’t ask, I may lapse into diabetes on the spot). There was a faint brininess lurking behind the primary aromas, and also something musky and dark, like overripe bananas, and mangoes just about ready to turn.

Moving on to taste, I felt the palate to be quite a bit better than expected, and certainly more than the nose. Normally 40% doesn’t do much for me, and here, yes that feeling of an scrawny, delicate spirit was here too…it was as thin and precise as my primary school teacher’s sharp excoriating tones (“Pay attention Mr. Caner!”) followed by the sharp snap of her two-foot long wooden ruler on my knuckles (“I warned you, Mr. Caner”). The whole initial profile was like that, very meticulously assembled, each note clear and separable from the next: bitter chocolate, salted caramel, toffee, burnt sugar; raisins, some orange peel. Then the ruler came, though not as painful – black cake, tart fruits, more raisins, molasses, blanketed by caramel and some breakfast spices. For 40% to give that much is quite something, and the finish is no slouch either – briny and dry, light all over with faint notes of cinnamon, olives, some crumbs of toblerone, with a final flirt of molasses and candied oranges.

So overall, not a bad rum at all, just not one that marks its territory with verve and authority of any kind. Like I said, if you were tasting it blind you wouldn’t be sure of its origin. No anise or rich fruity notes, no pot still action, nothing that would remind you of the raw thrumming power of a PM or EHP rum at all – in fact, the XM presents as rather restrained, overall. And this is both the advantage of such a blend, and to some extent its downfall because, sorry, but the comparison is inevitable. Beyond that, if you’re not a connoisseur of specific country’s styles and just want a good drink to pour into your glass at sundown, then none of that is your concern, and this excellent mid-tier sipper will fill the bill very nicely indeed.

(83/100)

Other notes

  • No information on additives (sugar or otherwise) is available. For my money it has not been tampered with.
  • The ageing regimen is unknown aside from it being done in situ in charred oak barrels which we can assume to be ex-bourbon.
  • My thanks to Dave of the RumGallery for pointing me in certain directions regarding background; and to Carlton for providing some details on history and operations

Cadenhead Sancti Spiritus “ADC” 1998 Cuban 14 Year Old Rum – Review

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May 022017
 

#361

The Sancti Spiritus distillery in Central Cuba, also known as Paraiso, has been making rums since 1946, and other than its history (see “other notes” below) there is remarkably little hard information about its operations, its size, volume or exports on hand. Aside from what must be substantial local production which we don’t see, they may be better known for the relatively new Ron Paraiso brand, as well as from the labels of independent bottlers like Compagnie des Indes, Kill Divil, Bristol Spirits, the Whisky Agency, and, here, W.M.Cadenhead. Based on what one sees for sale online, barrels seem to have begun hitting Europe somewhere around the mid 1990s, with the one I’m looking at today coming off the (columnar) still in 1998 and bottled at a firm 59.2% in 2013. Cadenhead, as usual, have amused themselves with putting the abbreviation “ADC” on the label, which could mean variously “Aroma de Cuba,“ or “Acerca de caña” or, in my patois, “All Done Cook” – any of these could be used, since Cadenhead never discloses – or doesn’t know itself – what the initials denote, and I’m tired of asking and getting “Ahhhh…duuuuh….Cuba?” in response.

A number of people who like the heavier, thrumming British West Indian rums (from Jamaica, Guyana, and Barbados for example) have sniffed disparagingly to me about Spanish rons recently, especially the column still ones, which are most of them. I suspect this has to do with their despite for Bacardi and the light Panamanian stuff that’s been slipping in the ratings of late. Nothing wrong with that, but my own feeling is that they’re casting too wide a net, and if one throws out an entire region’s worth of bathwater based on a few sampled rums, then one misses the baby that washed out the door as well. Maybe it’s the occasional lack of verifiable ageing, maybe it’s the lightness, maybe it’s the palate of the drinker. Don’t know. But this Cuban ron does deserve a closer look.

Consider first the nose on the pale yellow ron: it was a sparkling, light dose of crisp, clean aromas, starting off with rubbery, sweet acetones all at once. In its own way it was also quite tart, reminding me of gooseberries, pickled gherkins, cucumbers and lots of sugar water, stopping just short of presenting an agricole profile. I don’t think I could have sipped it blind and known immediately it was from Cuba. At a whisker shy of 60% it attacked strongly, but was too well made to be sharply malicious, and was simply and forcefully intense, which was to its credit and made the experience of smelling it a very good one, especially once some soursop, citrus and baking spices were coaxed out of hiding a few minutes later.

The taste fell down somewhat – there was dry wood, a lot of strange and almost-bitter tannins at the start; which was fortunately not a disqualification, because these tastes balanced off what might otherwise have been an overabundance of light sweetness represented by watermelon and papaya and Anjou pears. Gradually it unfolded like a flower at dawn, producing additional faint notes of orange zest, almost-ripe yellow mangoes and apricots, balanced by iodine, menthol (!!), tumeric and some strong black tea, all of which led to a conclusion that was suitably long, clear and spicy, closing off the show with nutmeg, more of that tartness, and a flirt of orange zest.

Briefly, Cadenhead’s ADC stacked up well against a raft of agricoles, Spanish and Surinamese rums that were on the table that day. It did make me think, though: reading around others experiences with Cuban rums generally, one thing that strikes me as consistent is that the demonstrably older a Cuban rum is, the more commonly it is scored high. Now pot still rums made with some skill can be good right out of the gate, and creole column-still juice out of the French islands prove all the time that higher age does not necessarily confer higher praise (or scores). But with column still rums made in the Cuban/Spanish style, the usual easy 40% young stuff or blended rons of some age just don’t have that sizzle which Cadenhead somehow extracted out of their barrel here. In other words, for such traditionally light rums, additional ageing is a better deal, it would seem.

So, in fine, I believe that this rum is better than the Havana Club Barrel Proof (and the Seleccion de Maestros that succeeded it), better than the Renegade 11 year old (but maybe I should retaste since I tried that one ages ago); it edges out the Santiago de Cuba 12 year old, though is perhaps not quite as good as the CDI Sancti Spiritus (also from 1998). Those dour Scots took the sunshine of the tropics, doused it with some cold salt sea-spray and foam-lashed rocks, and produced an amalgam of both that’s better than either, and just falls short of remarkable – it’s worth a try by anyone, if it can still be found.

(86.5/100)

Other notes

A few words on the distillery history: called variously the Paraiso or Sancti Spiritus distillery, the founding family, the Riondas, began their sugar business in 1891 with a company called the Tuinucú Sugar Company in the province of Sancti Spiritus (which was also near to the original Bacardi distillery). In 1946 the Paraiso Distillery was created and in 1951, the Tuinucú Sugar Company was consolidated into both plantation and distillery operations. Since the revolution, the Government took over the entire operation not long after and has run the show ever since.

Savanna

 4 Responses »
Feb 212017
 

 

Savanna, a distillery on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion (it’s east of Madagascar) was founded in 1870 as part of the drive by France to diversify sugar production after the loss of Saint Domingue (Haiti) and Ile de France (Mauritius) in the early 1800s. Distilleries had already appeared on Réunion by 1815 when Charles Desbassayns built the most sophisticated sugar cane mill of the island in the region of Chaudron, but records suggest primitive versions were in existence there for at least a hundred years before that. Rum production began to take on greater importance as a diversification measure after 1865, when the sugar crisis precipitated by the discovery of the beetroot sugar-making process required other sources of income to be exploited. The sugar crisis also had the effect of requiring consolidations and closures of the various estates – in 1830 there were 189 sugar factories, by 1914 they were reduced to around twenty and now there are only three.

Originally located in Saint Paul on the west of the island, what was later Savanna was then called “Parc à Jacques” or “Bout de l’étang” and was one of the first settlements there. At the beginning of the 19th century, Olive Lemarchand bought the property, which was then called the Sugar Estate of Savanna. In 1876, the Society of the Domain of Savanna was formed and the records of a functional distillery begin around this time, with molasses being the principal source of the spirit.

Photo (c) distilleriesavanna.com

Under various owners the sugar factory and its associated distillery continued operations until the post WWII years. The man most associated with Savanna in its current iteration was an enterprising islander named Émile Hugot (1904-1993), an engineer. He trained as a chemist in sugar factories on the French mainland at Artres and Bucy-le-Long before returning to Réunion in May 1928 where his priority was the provision of energy to the sugar factories. He became the Managing Dirctor of the Adam de Villiers Sugar Company at La Mare in 1932 (this was a factory to the west of the current Savanna location) before the Second World War interrupted his work and he mobilized. In the post-war years he restructured the sugar-based economy of the island and merged the factories and properties of La Mare, Savanna and Grand-Bois and the properties of La Convenance and l’Eperon) to form the Bourbon Sugar Company in 1948, to which he added the assets of Stella in 1952.

Savanna remained as a separate distillery under this umbrella, and although there were some rhums issued as “Rhum Bourbon” by the parent company (dates unknown) the operation as a whole eschewed what are now known as “own brand” or “estate” rums and shipped off most of its rums as bulk, to be used in the making of blends. In 1992 the distillery – as noted, it was originally established in Savanna in Saint Paul de la Réunion — was transferred to the Bois-Rouge site in the north-east of the island, near to the sugar refinery of the same name, with the ageing cellars following suit in 1995 and expanded further in 1999. It is completely integrated from the cane fields to the final bottling all taking place on site and, somewhat uniquely, makes both agricoles and molasses based rums as well as continuing to export bulk rum. The distillery runs with a continuous still which was constructed and put into operation around 1964.

Photo (c) PlanetRum.com

Changing market conditions and expansion into other areas of the Bourbon Sugar Company – most importantly international shipping and retailing – overshadowed the historic sugar-based backbone of the company, and gradually it divested itself of these holdings, and by 2001 it had sold Savanna to Groupe Quartier Français (which already controlled Rivière du Mât). GCF was a Reunion based company headquartered in the north of the island which dealt primarily in sugar and rum. But in 2010 GQF itself was acquired by Tereos, a global French-based conglomerate which had its origins in the 19th century, and deals to this day in sugar, beets and its derivatives, distilleries and cereals. (GQF was dissolved in 2013 and no longer exists). This is the situation today.

The Distillery of Savanna distills and aging a complete range of rum: light rum, traditional rum, agricultural rum, and various aged rums. It is the first European distillery to be ISO 9002 certified. The French Association for Quality Assurance awarded it ISO 9001 (2000 version) in July 2003. Although from the outset Savanna produced rums for bulk sales, with 80% of its production exported to metropolitan France and the European Union, in 2003 the company developed its own range of rums, some agricoles, some not – this was the beginning of a renaissance within the company as it developed its own brands: older ones like the “Varangue” were retired and a whole new menu was created:

  • “Creol,” (agricole rhums from juice, with or without finishes),
  • “Intense” (molasses based, aged and unaged, at all strengths),
  • “Lontan” (grand arôme / high ester, from molasses),
  • “Metis” (blend of molasses and cane juice rums),
  • The limited series of 10 YO Maison Blanche blends (1998, 2000, 2002, 2005 et al)
  • “Millenium” – a premium 15 YO blend issued in 2015

References

Rum list

(Note: because the company has been active for so long, this list is the best I could come up with and I may have missed a few…but as always, it’s a good starting point, and is good as of 2017. I updated as I found new ones and had the time).

Wild Island Edition 2020

  • Savanna Traditionnel 2003-2019 16 YO Armagnac Finish 52.7%
  • Savanna Grand Agricole 2012-2018 6 YO Calvados Finish 57.6%
  • Savanna Grand Arome 2005-1018 13 YO 56.4%
  • Savanna Grand Arome 2003-2018 15 YO 66.5%

L’Esprit

 2 Responses »
Feb 082017
 

***

L’Esprit is a small French brand founded by Tristan Prodhomme of mixed Welsh, Scottish and Breton ancestry. His biography is about as interesting as any I’ve come across. Strictly speaking, he and his small operation are not into rhums, but whiskies (which miffs me, because I think their relative importance should be reversed, but I can’t have everything, so…). Somewhat like Don Jose Navarro of Havana Club who gained a degree in thermodynamics and then turned to distilled spirits, Tristan majored in Philosophy before evincing a strong interest in the obscure Scottish tipple, although to that point he had been no more than a dabbler in the field – in other words, he drank it. In 2003, needing to finance a holiday in Scotland, he ended up working at The Whisky Shop in Edinburgh, and much to his own surprise, did not return to France (Brittany) for four years. In that time he gained a wealth of experience about the different kinds of whiskies, tasting and selecting and buying them, and something about the fundamentals of the business as a whole.

Photo (c) Whiskyandco.net

By 2007 he was straining at the leash and wanted to return home. Moreover, he wanted to expand the selection of whiskies available to the French consumers, and he simply could not fathom why, with such a large scotch-swilling population, there were so few stores dedicated to their sale. He was confident enough by then to feel he could start up his own shop, and set about doing so. Somewhat like Nine Leaves but without the still, Tristan opened up Whisky&Rhum with his partner, and became the owner, purchasing agent, sales manager, accountant, secretary, designer, webmaster, deliveryman, carpenter, independent bottler, all in one (or two, depending on how you look at it). Calling himself a specialist, not a generalist, he kept his shelves stocked with what he himself had selected, rather then going on buying sprees and shelling out for everything in sight, a practice of which he disapproves. This way, one infers, he gets to be able to recommend everything he sells, and knows it by its first name, which may keep sales smaller than an “everything is here” establishment, but permits him to stand behind each and every product he stocks.

Some years later, Tristan remembered his own personal reference rum, the Rum Nation Guatemala 23 year old (for which I have myself been searching for years – it’s one of their earlier bottlings), and in thinking about it, wondered why rum was not as commercialized, or even as well known, as the whiskies were. Rum had, at this time, just started to take its first real baby steps into its own renaissance, helped by many new bloggers who had become active around this point and were raising the profile of the spirit around the world. Single-cask full-proof rums “back then” were making small splashes but few ripples, helped along by indies such as Renegade, Silver Seal, Moon Imports, Rum Nation, Fassbind, Samaroli and a few others (in spite of its age, Velier had not yet penetrated the mainstream and changed the game…that came later). But, like others before and after him, Tristan thought that rather than mass produced 40% bottlings everyone drank, he could do better, bootstrapping his experience with The Whisky Shop which also produced their own such variations, the quality of which was always above-par.

Tristan Prodhomme at Paris 2014 RumFest; Photo (c) Whisky-rhum.com – taken from FB page

With this in mind, in 2010 he launched the marque of L’Esprit (“the spirit”, or, “the mind”, which kind of makes sense, right?) with two whiskies and a single rum. In the following years, for his rums and rhums, he bought one barrel at a time – from brokers, not distilleries, so primarily aged in Europe – and spent time ensuring that what he put on the shelf was something he personally enjoyed. Because his establishment was still small, he didn’t go the Rum Nation route and never issued hundreds of cases of the rarefied juice at a time, spread out over the entire world. His expectation and strategy was more modest, and stayed at single casks, at most a couple hundred bottles, and to this day you’ll have to do some legwork to find one outside of Europe in general, and France in particular. Of course, it’s still whisky that dominates his interest, but in quiet corners of the rumiverse where the grog-blog boys hang out, there are growing whispers that the man makes a decent rhum and it might be worth getting them while they last.

While eschewing filtration and additions of any kind, Tristan doesn’t really go in for the full cask strength experience, preferring to tame the beasts with water – this is why most of his sample kits have a sample bottle with water included. He believes that dilution is perfectly fine, since “It works!” – it brings out subtler flavours in the spirits, permits perfumes, smokiness, the quieter notes, to shine and become more evident; high-power intensity often masks these. As a consequence, he prefers a range of 45-50% in his bottlings, though in recent years, bowing to the wishes of the market, he has produced rums that are stronger, always in lots of a hundred, from the same barrels as the lower proofed ones; he noted in an interview that while this is what other shops wanted from him, his own experience was that 46% rums sold much better and were also better value for money in his own estimation, so he produces both. A proponent of terroire, he doesn’t blindly follow that as a lodestar, and selects the casks he buys primarily because of his notion of their quality, and his own judgement.

That judgement seems to be quite solid: he’s issued rums from Brazil, Belize, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Barbados, Haiti, Guyana and Jamaica (all the old stalwarts, I like to joke), and it’s likely that as his reputation and brand becomes better known, he’ll expand and go to other countries, issue different variations. Already he has an arrangement to have La Maison de l’Hédonisme distribute his bottlings (including the other drink), and it’s probably just a matter of time before we see more. There are two shops now, one in Rennes an another in Vannes. DuRhum, ever ahead of the curve, did a feature on the company in 2013, the Rumporter magazine featured his rums twice, Serge of WhiskyFun has consistently rated the rums well (the Caroni got a 91), he was at the 2014 Paris Rumfest showing off his stuff, and there’s no doubt more is coming.

Independent bottlers are not as rare as four years ago when Cyril first wrote about this tiny company and many are much better known. Most dip from the same well in assembling their single-cask, fullproof rums and rhums – what to some extent marks Tristan out from the others is the slow, patient way he has of improving those casks he buys, incrementally expanding the range and the quality each time. If the mark of any independent bottler is how much we want to source the earlier rums they made at the beginning of their careers (like Rum Nation’s 1974 Demerara, or Velier’s Skeldon 1973), then I believe that we should pay some attention to L’Esprit as well. This is a company that, small or not, has potential to grow into something bigger in the years to come, a journey in which I at least, wish the man a lot of luck.

Sources (most are in French):

The list of rums issued as of January 2017 is below. I’m fairly certain this is most of them, to that point, but it needs updating beyond that date.

The 300th Review

 5 Responses »
Sep 082016
 

300

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I feel like a literary flea next to someone like Serge Valentin on Whisky Fun, who just published his 12,000th whisky tasting note. But you know, given the slender reach of my purse, the way I write and the time available to do it all, I’m not displeased with reaching this little milestone.

“About two or three years,” the Last Hippie (who now runs the site AllThingsWhisky) and I remarked to each other many moons ago, when we were discussing longevity. “Maybe a hundred or so rums.” That’s how long it was thought I’d be able to write for our origin site Liquorature. I had counted all the rums available in our local stores, and never seriously imagined it could get beyond that. I started writing in mid-2009, began posting in early 2010, and with one break, have kept on ever since. The hundred rums passed by the wayside, and now, if you can believe it, reviews are into their seventh year, the ‘Caner is passing the three hundredth essay (more if you count the Rumaniacs) and the whole exercise has thrown off branches in all kinds of directions unforeseen at the inception.

Wow. 300 reviews. I still stand back in astonishment every now and then when I see a number like that. Such a miniscule output will never impress Serge (640+ rums and counting) or Dave Russell (~380), or whisky sites which boast hundreds, if not thousands of reviews. Yet I can’t help but thump my scrawny mosquito-physique chest a little, because even though I’m small-fry compared to those guys, I still recall that time when I thought a hundred would be cool to do…and the idea of this many seemed beyond comprehension.

What accounts for it? Well, all kinds of things – a genuine love and interest in the subject, of course. It’s not a job, really, or anything remotely resembling the drudgery of work. I don’t have a boss (always nice). Unlike employment, I actually get (mostly) positive feedback that shows others share this interest, this passion. People communicate. And it’s not just enthusiasts, but producers, other writers, bartenders…I’m not a very sociable individual, but I now have more friends, in more countries around the world, then I ever imagined possible, and most are unstinting with advice, samples, corrections, assistance, background materials, commentary, photographs, or just plain old conversation. It was no accident that Henrik of Rum Corner, Cornelius of Barrel Proof, Gregers and I, were able to talk for six straight hours without repeating ourselves back in 2015, while damaging the hell out of some rums that for their age and price were utterly unobtainable for me back in 2009. Engagement with the broader community is alternately exasperating or educating. Most of the time it’s simply fun.

I always have this vision of some guy on a cold winter night, looking at a rum on a shelf, breaking out his phone to scan for a review, reading about it here, sighing at my long-windedness, but then maybe doing a double take, perhaps laughing, and then mumbling to himself, “This s.o.b. ain’t bad.” (Well, okay…I can dream, right?)

So a big thank you for all of you who have taken the time to read along, and who touch base from time to time. It’s not only because of you all, but for you all, that this site keeps running.

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2015 Germany spread

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Everything below is a review of what’s been happening on the site, some thoughts of my own, and some statistics for those who are curious:

1. Most viewed reviews

The Bacardi 151, which I still think is the funniest, followed by the Velier biography, the latter of which remains the fastest climbing post, ever…it hit a thousand views in under an hour the day I put it up. The other two highly viewed articles which always surprise me are the Austrian Stroh 80 and the Cuban Guayabita del Pinar, neither of which are sterling standouts or on anyone’s must-have list, yet they keep chugging along, day after day. Quite astonishing for such niche products.

 

2. Least read article ever

The Jamel cachaca review (quite recent, so no surprise) and also the Canadian Momento Amber rum, which few would ever have found, let alone bought…it really wasn’t that good, more a backyard rotgut in my opinion. The Renegade Jamaica 2008 is also on the list (and that’s been around for ages), which kinda confirms my opinion that they were ahead of the curve all those years ago, and should have stuck with their special edition rum lines. With the rise of indie bottlers in the last years, they could have maybe been not only one of the pioneers, but in the lead.

 

3. My favourite rums of these 100, and new discoveries.

Leaving aside all the Velier rums (we all know they’re good, so let’s give somebody else a moment in the sun), here’s what I liked or which enthused me:

D3S_3789Norse Cask Demerara 1975

An expensive purchase but worth every penny. Over thirty years of ageing of a Demerara rum, leading to a magnificently rich and pungent dark behemoth. I now wish I had bought the full bottle instead of the smaller (but cheaper) version. If it had been no more than a raving taste monster dive bombing the palate, that would have been good enough, but when tried in conjunction with the Cadenhead from the same year (at <41%), it became clear why full proofs should be made more often.

 

D3S_3715Rhum Rhum Liberation 2012 Integrale

If there is ever a choice between the standard strength 2012 and the Integrale 2012, get the Integrale. This thing is an amazing agricole, so good that even regular rummies will have little too complain about. It may be among the best, if not the best, five year old rhum that I’ve been fortunate enough to sample, and proves once again that age is no indicator of quality.

 

 

Clairins

Like my father, I mix erudition and peasantry in my character in equal and cheerful doses. The clairins unabashedly appeal to the lizard brain of the latter. They’re big, brutish, nasty taste hammers, unrefined and uncouth, yet, once we get past all that acetone and paint thinner, we remember something quite remarkable coiling around underneath. Some call that a “unique flavour profile”…I call it pretty damned good, and yes, I know I’m in a minority on this one.

 

Chnatal 1980 2Chantal Comte 1980

Without a doubt, the best sub-ten year old rhum I’ve ever tried. Ever. At nine hundred euros, it was pricey — okay, it was more than pricey, it was near-divorce-level-pricey (the conversation started “I gave up a Prada purse for this s**t?” at overproof decibel levels, and went rapidly downhill from there). But man, that combination of sumptuousness and complexity was amazingly tasty, and showcased all the reasons why agricoles are great products we should never ignore just ’cause we never found one we liked.

 

Black Tot 1The Black Tot

I appreciate this rum not because of its intrinsic quality – though that wasn’t half bad – but because of its history and heritage. Sometimes you just get a rum because you want it, and I wanted this one for a long time.

 

 

 

Epris 1L’Espirit Epris Bourbon finished Brazilian Rum

For a small outfit that is practically unknown outside of France, they certainly make some good hooch, these guys. This one might not have been a true cachaca, yet it exhibited markers of taste and style that was a cut above the ordinary. Purely on my appreciation of this one rum (provided to me gratis by Cyril of duRhum), I contacted the company to get more, just to see if they were as good as I thought they were.

 

 

Compagnie des Indes: Indonesia and Guadeloupe

Undoubtedly my new maker of choice for this one hundred reviews is CDI. I looked at Prichard’s, Nine Leaves, a raft of agricoles, and rums from around the world, and somehow the Indonesia stood out in my memory; and the Guadeloupe, issued at 43% was an excellent and affordable 16 year old rhum. While I may never get all of CDI’s products, I’m sure glad I managed to try these two.

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4. Other bloggers’ articles

Like any serious interest, writing about rums requires keeping up with the news and issues of the day. More and more we are seeing bloggers put out informative and thought-provoking essays which enrich our understanding of the subculture. Here are some of the best articles I read while putting out my own hundred reviews. The quality of the thinking behind each heightens my appreciation for the writers who take the time to go beyond mere tasting notes and into informative corners of the rumworld which amuse, inform and educate:.

The Cocktail Wonk’s article on E&A Scheer

Matt Pietrek’s essays on the Jamaican distilleries were exercises in depth and detail, and I enjoyed them a lot, not least for the information they provided, but it was the one about E&A Scheer I found the most enlightening. All of us hear about independent bottlers buying casks from “brokers” without ever going further. Matt pulled back the curtain on what that actually meant, and how a very old company still provides stock for many of the small companies whose rums we appreciate. An enormously informative and entertaining read.

The Fat Rum Pirate: The World of Independent Bottlings

Wes Burgin from the UK has put out quite a few essays regarding sugar, quality in rums and other issues of the day. I don’t always agree with his arguments, yet that doesn’t invalidate the points he makes, and they always engender valuable discussions. This one was more factual than opiniated and pulled together many strands of the available information on who and what independent bottlers are.

Josh Miller at Inu A Kena: “Plugging into the Rum World” and the “Cachaca Challenge”

Josh and I are in contact off an on through social media, and I usually give him a good-natured ribbing about how he doesn’t write enough. That’s because I like what he writes, and what he does write is always worth a read. Two pieces he put out over the last year and a bit are worthy of mention (again): the summary of online websites dedicated to rums and cocktail culture, and the one where he pulled together fourteen cachacas at once to see how they stacked up in a caipirinha. I wrote to him after he published the latter and bemoaned my inability to get that many Brazilian rums at all, at which he laughed and told me his bar is always open to my tasting glass, if I ever get over to San Francisco.

5. Site focus in the next hundred

1. Continuing emphasis on agricoles

Moving into the French-style rumworld opened up huge vistas of enjoyment for me. Like many who started with the usual stuff, I disdained the clear, grassy profiles of agricoles, yet I plugged away and found that they grew on me. I found more quality rums here than I suspected. Of course, since I’m closer to Europe than to North America, it’s also easier to find them, and practically the entire French blogging community — many of whom I’m happy to know on a personal basis — is happy to chip in and point me to samples, overlooked gems and provide information.

2. Leaving the West Indies Behind

Naah…just kidding. The Caribbean will always remain the bastion of the spirit – more rums come from there than anywhere else. Yet it was and remains intriguing how many local rums there are from other parts of the world. I enjoyed CDI’s Indonesia, didn’t care for the Fijians, and I know there’s stuff from Africa, Australia and Polynesia that many of us have never even heard about. Everyone’s heard of Mount Gay or El Dorado….but it’s the weird ones from, oh, Mozambique, that I want to write about. So for the next few years I’ll be casting a much wider net than before, to see what I can come up with that some might have an interest in.

3. More cachacas

Just as with agricoles, I felt it was time to see what was going on in Brazil. I’ll likely not have the facility to pick up very many, but I’m trying to buy more than usual, and they will remain a focus of mine for the next few years. Also, as initially with agricoles, I currently don’t care for them much, so the only way to see whether I’m full of Kraken is to try as many as possible. Maybe I’ll find the gold nuggets in the mud which I’m absolutely convinced lurk in the backdam, awaiting only a persevering nose to ferret out.

4. More Essays

Maybe. This is a time issue more than anything else. Good essays have to express a cogently argued point of view and require a depth of research which takes a lot of time. But I’ll keep at it. The Makers section, if nothing else, needs to have more.

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6. Trends in the rum world I continue to follow

Sugar/Additives

This is an issue that just won’t subside, and never should. It engenders enormous passions on all sides of the divide. I dislike the hysterical adamance of the purists who sneer at and denounce anyone who likes a sweetened rum, but I’m equally at war with those producers who refuse to disclose additives of any kind under the guise of it being legal. Legal or not, the consuming class is a far cry from the sheeple who accepted everything as little as five years ago, and it’s vocal proponents of disclosure who are making raising awareness a problem that new entrants to the field cannot afford to ignore. I can hope, I guess. Sugar will never go away — it’s too tightly interwoven with the culture of rum — but maybe we can look forward to a day when people get a full brief on what they’re pouring into their glass. People are welcome to like whatever they like, and if we have our way, at least they’ll know why.

Classification

The old standard of grading or classing rums by colour is more or less dead, yet the influential “styles” of Mr. Broome is proving a tougher nut to crack. As with many things, it’s the adaptation to exceptions that show how good the rules are. Here, not so much. More and more we are seeing agricoles issued in other places than the French islands; blends of rums from multiple regions make their appearances more often than before; additives are nowhere to be found; and the difference between pot still and column still rums continue to confound many. Luca Gargano’s system is a step in the right direction, though I still think it does not address outliers satisfactorily, and by ignoring the immediate source of the distillate – molasses, sugar cane juice or “other” – an opportunity may have been lost to win wider acceptance. Still, no matter how it ends up, the issue is definitely getting the attention it deserves.

New Entrants

It’s an old joke that “rum is the next big thing … and always will be”. Yet nothing suggests the acceptance of the spirit as a class act in its own right as the explosion of smaller micro-producers, especially in the US and Canada, and the surge of independent bottlers in Europe. People are getting fed up with the high price of scotch, maybe, and constant blogging has made everyone aware that rum takes second place to no spirit at the top end. Rum Nation, Plantation, Samaroli, Velier, Moon Imports, Berry Bros., Fassbind…these are decades-old companies who are finding their place in the sun courtesy of a new crop of writers and bloggers who champion their work, but others are muscling into the market as well: L’Espirit, Ekte, Compagne des Indes. The sheer variety is astonishing and there’s something for every taste, from brute force mastodons at 60% to milder palate pleasers at 40%.

Cask Strength

Nothing pleases me more than the move at the top end to move past 40-43%. The indies mentioned above were always issuing such rums, of course, in a bottle here and there, and Renegade, who perhaps were ahead of the curve but then dropped out, created one of the first “lines” of rums that took this to 46% in their limited editions. But perhaps it is Velier we should thank for kicking off the trend, because not only are the majority of independent bottlers now issuing rums at strengths between 50-65% but the big guns like FourSquare, Mount Gay, and DDL are catching on and doing the same. I look forward to the day when all standard strength rums made by big companies are issued alongside their premium beefcake brothers so consumers can pick one or the other depending on taste.

Truth in Advertising and Disclosure

Too many makers are stuck in the pre-social-media world. It seems to escape many of them that there is a vocal and knowledgeable community out there that disseminate information faster that was ever possible before. Agreed, most people who like rum simply want an opinion they can rely on (hence the rise of bloggers and online reviewers, since only a fool trusts a company website touting its own quality), but what annoys the Twitterati and Facebook Faithful more than anything else is (a) the lack of disclosure on labels or online materials as to what is actually in the rum, i.e. additives and (b) what the rum is made of, and how, what still, from what raw stock, aged for how long. Like it or not, people want to know this stuff, which is why Arome (which I have not tried) got an online faceful for being not only evasive but outright condescending. This of course traces its genesis to the sugar imbroglio from above.

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And so there you have it. One person’s ramblings about rum, the rum universe and our place within it. I realize with every passing year that not only will I never taste them all, but can only ever scratch the surface of the sometimes bewildering variety available to us fortunate souls (at a still reasonable cost compared to that obscure Scottish drink). If I were to give a single piece of advice to anyone regarding rum – especially those now getting interested – it’s to never stop with just one, but try many, just to understand how wide an area the rumiverse actually covers. I learn something new every week, make new discoveries and it remains a remarkable experience.

So, walk a little further down the rum road with me. There’s more coming. There’s always more coming.

Thanks to all of you who have read not only this far in this essay, but overall. Your comments and visits are valued, and welcome, and appreciated.

All the very best

 

The Lone Caner

Compagnie des Indes

 4 Responses »
Jan 262016
 

cdi-logo

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For a company in existence for such a short time, it’s quite impressive what a wide range of rums Compagnie des Indes (which translates as the East India Company, hereinafter referred to as CDI) has managed to put out the door. As of the 2015 release season, fourteen separate countries are represented (2 from east of Greenwich). Unlike the trend in the USA and Canada, where creating one’s own new distillery and brand is more common, in Europe it’s always been more about being an independent bottler (or re-bottler, I suppose). Such enterprises don’t want to reinvent the wheel or invest in technology – though this does in fact happen as well, of course (e.g. Severin Simon in Germany). Their strategy is to exhaustively seek out barrels from either source or broker, maybe age them a little more somewhere, and then issue them under their own label, usually in limited quantities of less than a thousand bottles per release.

While it could be argued that this hardly makes them cradles of innovation, it’s tough to fault the results when we can so rarely find the source distillers daring to go in the full-proof direction. Until very recently, when was the last time you saw St. Lucia Distillers, FourSquare, Appleton, Mount Gay, Angostura, Travellers, Abuelo, Bacardi, Flor de Cana or other major brands, go the cask strength route in anything but their overproof 151s? So smaller companies, whose founders often emerge from a whisky background, tend to be more into the full proof concept which has only recently started to gain great recognition in the rum world.

Such a person is Florent Beuchet, who pursued international business studies with a specialization as an International Trade Master of wine and spirits in Dijon, France. After working part time for his father, who himself was a winemaker and ran a small distillery making absinthe and aniseed, Florent became the brand manager for Banks in New York in 2011 (his family owned shares in the company, and Florent’s father acted as a consultant for it). This lasted for close on to two years, after which he bought a small spirits trading company he named “Diva Spirits” in 2013. This outfit dealt with the import and export of wines and spirits between Europe and the USA, and built on a network his father had created over the previous thirty five years.

cdi logo 2

Photo (c) L’homme a la poussette

While his studies had focused primarily on wines, Florent realized after working with Banks that rum interested him rather more: partly this was its versatility (read: absence of rules) but also because he saw that the concepts of terroire, distillation, ageing and blending were readily applicable to rum just as they were to wine. More, he sensed that while the Europeans had a rather more sophisticated view of rums than Americans did, many still labored under the impression that it was a disreputable sort of drink, cheaply made, good only for a mix, and very sweet. The potential of exactingly made rums from single casks issued at full proof was still gathering steam (online reviews of rums made to precisely those specs were just beginning to appear at this time, if you discount Serge Valentin, who’d been issuing notes on them since 2010, and modesty be damned, some of them were mine). So he saw an opening in the field that to this point had been dominated by Samaroli, Rum Nation, Velier, Moon Imports and others, few of which had the visibility and cachet they acquired in the subsequent years.

Seeking to put his ideas into practice, he formed CDI in March of 2014, in France. He sourced the rums he wanted via brokers in Holland and the UK, chose only unadulterated rums, and eschewed Rum Nation and Velier’s practice of going directly to the original distilleries in person to root around the warehouses seeking the perfect barrel (as of 2016, he has only been to Cuba, oddly enough). The label design, with its old fashioned seal and fancy stylistic touches at the top was a calculated decision on his part – he wanted to provide something of the atmosphere and heritage of old times, sailing ships and galleons and parchment (one wonders how the famous aphorism of rum, buggery and the lash figured in his thinking, but never mind). It’s noteworthy that he had taken a sense of the room, and understood the need for providing clarity and information – and so each label also had a Velier-style section at the bottom on age, source, strength and barrel.

He also doesn’t hide that he is a disciple of honesty in rum making. He has little patience for the solera style of rum making, which he sees as dishonest way to market what is actually a blend with a misleading age statement; and he disdains rectified column-still spirit that is added to with flavourings and sugars and fancy backstories to disguise the fact that it is a commercial low end “rum”…and is then sold to an unsuspecting public as a real rum, when its artificiality is self-evident. In that he is a follower of Richard Seale and Luca Gargano (among others), who have long championed pure rums and label disclosure.

cdi rums

Photo (c) Whiskyleaks.fr

His initial offerings from that year into the market were modest: first a Caribbean blend, then two Belize rums (same source, different strengths), a Cuban, a Guadeloupe and an 18 year old Caroni. From the outset he knew he was going after unadulterated, pure rums, but felt that to make any kind of initial splash he perhaps had to compromise the principle, and so has added 15g/L of organic liquid cane sugar to the Caraibes blended rum and the 2015 release of the Latino, as well as 10g/L to the “Calbar” Jamaican (but to none of the others). To his credit, this information is disclosed and he makes no secret of it. (And given the RumDiaries take on the Caraibes, Florent may have been right, though Josh of Inakena disagrees, finding the dosing too obvious; current releases of Caraibes no longer have any sugar). Age is also exactly what it purports to be — meaning the true age of the rum in barrels; and even in the blends, it is never the oldest, but always the youngest portion of the blend which is noted.

Issued to the European market, sales were positive and encouraging. In April 2015 I tried the Cuban 15 YO in Paris, and was mightily impressed, scoring it at 88 points, and remarking that “…If this is anything to go by, CDI is going to take its place among the craft makers whose rums I want to buy. All of them.” My purse and my time are limited so I have not been able to try as many as I would have liked, but certainly the customer response was gratifying enough for CDI to expand into a larger selection in 2015, when they added rums from Martinique, Barbados, Fiji, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, St. Lucia and Indonesia to the mix.

The Haitian rhum was intriguing, what with the recent upsurge in interest in clairins issued by Velier; Fiji has some tongues wagging…but the Indonesia rum in particular excited quite a lot of interest because it was so unusual (and because the distillery was not disclosed) – Florent wanted to recreate something of the flavor of Batavia Arrack, one of the progenitors of rum, and whether or not he succeeded, I don’t know – I just know I liked it quite a bit. Jamaica was also a good issue, because most lovers of the funky style are more familiar with Appleton’s work, not Hampden or Worthy Park, or New Yarmouth which was issued in 2017. So certainly CDI is putting some interesting footprints into the sand of the rum world, and showing that while the trailblazers like Renegade, Samaroli, Rum Nation and Velier provided and continue to make many amazing rums for the consuming public, there remains space for new companies with a slightly different ethos to make their mark and provide greater variety of rums for us all to try.

A peculiar divergence from the norm is the rums issued only in the Danish market. These are some of the rums certain to pique the interest of the cdigreater rum loving public – especially the aged Guyanese rums and the cask strength 60% Panamanian, which is surely quite an unusual product (I honestly can’t remember when was the last time I saw a full proof Panama rum). Henrik of RumCorner, as helpful as always, and who had spotted me the CDI Guadeloupe from there which I have to write about soon, informed me that “…those releases were done in collaboration with the Danish distributor. Denmark is one of the fastest growing markets for premium and ultra premium rums, so they asked CDI for some limited cask strength products and voila. In my opinion the Barbados FourSquare 60% rum [for example] really shows what is possible at high strength in comparison with the standard issue 40% horde.” Florent confirmed that, remarking “Once I started selling single cask to Denmark, my importer and his team told me that they’d like to know if I could bottle rums at cask strength. I told them that I could but due to duties, the prices in France would be too expensive and they wouldn’t sell so that they would have to buy the whole cask. [They did.] That’s why I decided to mention on the label that it was only bottled for Denmark…[Denmark] has quite an educated brown spirit clientele that are willing to pay a lot for pretty exclusive bottles. That’s mostly the story.”

So where to now? Promotion and marketing will be a big focus. Florent thinks traditional magazine space is too expensive, and prefers to engage with the public at festivals (which is where I met him and bored him to tears – twice), as well as using social media to interact with his customers. That’s usually where he can be found lurking. He will continue to have all his packaging, corking, labelling etc, done in France. Ageing of his selected barrels is primarily in Europe, though some tropical ageing does take place. In that he departs from Velier, who championed in-situ tropical ageing because of the accelerated maturation and richer flavour profiles they so preferred; Florent believes that wood takes on an dominance under such conditions, which replaces subtler, fruitier notes which he likes better. (Steve James’s review of the Barbados 16 YO made mention of this difference which he attributed to the ageing regime.)

CDI Florent

Florent in Berlin RumFest, 2015.

The year 2016 suggested that the Danish market full proof editions were no mere flash in the pan. Whether more were issued for them, or the clamour to have a wider distribution of rums bottled at >50% was acted on, the fact is that the 2016 releases sported no fewer than twelve rums bottled at cask strength (most at around 60%). Maybe some kind of “twinning” is being worked on, where a standard table strength rum is issued with its mate offered to the cognoscenti at a higher proof point – this makes for higher prices since the volume issued would be less, but it seems as though Florent has sensed a market opportunity here and is working on maximizing it. Blends which tread the path of the Caraibes will also continue, with rhums like the Tricorne and Boulet de Cannon being issued at intervals. And there’s also a flavoured/spiced rhum called Darklice (licorice and other additions, and the name is evocative if nothing else) added to the stable, which is his first foray in that direction.

The current stable of countries will be expanded upon in the future (2018 and 2019 saw additional rums from Venezuela and Australia join the lineup, for example), though of course there will continue to be releases from each of the existing rum producing islands in the Caribbean. And just to say “Martinique” is an oversimplification, since one rhum from there that CDI issued was from Dillon and another from Simon, and that is a small percentage of the distilleries over there. So while they are more expensive than rums from the English and Spanish Caribbean, they can’t be ruled out for more releases, and of course there will always be rums from Barbados, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Guyana and Jamaica to beef up the portfolio.

My own hope is that he won’t be seduced by the sales of the spiced and blended variations of his line, but will sleuth out little known islands and distilleries and geographical regions and do what Luca has done – bottle and promote rums we haven’t seen in a while, or ever, which we’d like to try and which exemplify the global reach of the spirit. They may not all be the best available (Fiji did not find much favour with me, sorry), but you have to give points to the new kid on the block, who’s really doing something interesting for rum. That’s worth ten truckloads of Don Papa right there.

***

References:

  1. Personal conversations and emails and messages with Florent Beuchet
  2. Interview with FB by whiskyandco.net
  3. ReferenceRhum.com
  4. Posts on CDI Facebook page
  5. Tiare’s post on A Mountain of Crushed Ice
  6. Rumporter
  7. Rumconer.dk
  8. 4FineSpirits.de interview with FB
  9. Online posted interview with FB by Joerg Meyer (2016)
  10. Rumporter October 2016 article
  11. Company site

A list of rhums issued by CDI as of May 2019 is below. As always, if you know something has been missed, send me a correction with the specs.

  • Australia 11 YO 2007-2019 43% #ASS53 (Secret Distillery)
  • Barbados 12 YO 2003-2015 45% #BD91 (FourSquare)(323 bottles)
  • Barbados 12 YO 2003-2015 45% #BD92 (FourSquare)(302 bottles)
  • Barbados 16 YO 1998-2015 45% #BD24 (FourSquare)(354 bottles)
  • Barbados 16 YO 1998-2015 45% #BD36 (FourSquare)(363 bottles)
  • Barbados 16 YO 1998-2015 45% #BD47 (FourSquare)(351 bottles)
  • Barbados 16 YO 1998-2015 45% #MRS236 (FourSquare)
  • Barbados 16 YO 1998-2015 60% #MRS235 (FourSquare)(Denmark only)
  • Barbados 20 YO 1998-2016 45% #BYR5 (Multiple distilleries)
  • Barbados 16 YO 1999-2016 62% #FS8 (Foursquare)
  • Barbados 16 YO 1999-2016 62% #FS9 (Foursquare)
  • Barbados 16 YO 1999-2016 62% #FS20 (Foursquare)
  • Barbados 9 YO 2006-2016 62.1% #MB45 (Foursquare)
  • Barbados 9 YO 2006-2016 62.1% #MB46 (Foursquare)
  • Barbados 9 YO 2006-2016 62.1% #MB47 (Foursquare)
  • Barbados 10 YO 2007-2018 62.9% #BFD019 (Foursquare)
  • Barbados 10 YO 2007-2018 43% #BFD014 (Foursquare)
  • Barbados 10 YO 2007-2018 62.1% #BFD015 (Foursquare)
  • Belize 8 YO 2005-2014 44% #B86 (Travellers) (400 bottles)
  • Belize 8 YO 2005-2014 44% #SF17 (Travellers) (415 bottles)
  • Belize 8 YO 2005-2014 64% #SF48 (Travellers) (277 bottles)
  • Belize 11 YO 2005-2016 66.2% BL11 (Travellers)(Cask Strength)
  • Belize 10 YO 2006-2016 TBA% #TBA (Travellers)
  • Belize 10 YO 2006-2016 TBA% #TBA (Travellers) (Cask Strength)
  • Brazil 16 YO 2000-2016 43% #BR10 (Epris)
  • Boulet de Canon No. 1 2015 46% (blend Guy/Bar/T&T)
  • Boulet de Canon No. 2 2016 50% (blend Guy/Bar/T&T)
  • Boulet de Canon No. 3 2016 50% (blend Guy/Bar/T&T)
  • Boulet de Canon No. 4 2017 46% (blend Guy/Bar/T&T)
  • Boulet de Canon No. 5 2017 46% (blend Florida rums)
  • Boulet de Canon No. 6 2018 46% (blend Nicaragua/Panama)
  • Cuba 15 YO 1998-2014 45% #C67 (Sancti Spiritus) (280 bottles)
  • Cuba 16 YO 1998-2014 45% #CM5 (Sancti Spiritus) (232 bottles)
  • Cuba 16 YO 1998-2014 45% #CM8 (Sancti Spiritus) (280 bottles)
  • Cuba 16 YO 1998-2015 45% #CM34 (Sancti Spiritus)
  • Cuba 18 YO 1999-2017 45% #CSS11 (Sancti Spiritus)
  • Cuba 18 YO 1999-2017 59% #CSS7 (Sancti Spiritus) (Denmark only)
  • Darklice Blend 2016 46% (Guy/Bar/T&T) + licoriced water
  • Dominidad No. 1 15 YO 2000-2016 43% #SB1 (Small Batch)(33% 15YO DR / 67% 16YO T&T)
  • Dominidad No. 2 15 YO 2000-2016 43% #SB2 (Small Batch)(33% 15YO DR / 67% 16YO T&T)
  • Dominidad No. 3 16 YO 2002-2017 43% #SB3 (Small Batch)(33% 15YO DR / 67% 16YO T&T)
  • Dominican Republic 15 YO 2000-2016 64.9% #RDV 3 (Various)
  • Dominican Republic 13 YO 2003-2017 46% #RDM 1 (Various)
  • Dominican Republic 16 YO 2001-2017 62% #RDV 2 (Various)(Denmark only)
  • Dominican Republic 8 YO 2010-2019 43% #DRA3 (AFD. (Acoholes Finos Dominicanos))
  • Dominican Republic 8 YO 2010-2019 62.1% #DRA6 (AFD. (Acoholes Finos Dominicanos))
  • El Salvador 9 YO 2007-2018 43% #A46 (Cihuatan)
  • Florida 13 YO 2004-2018 45% #FMSC1 (Distillery Unknown)(finish Moscatel Cask)
  • Florida 14 YO 2004-2018 44% #FMM21 (Distillery Unknown)(finish French Whisky Casks)
  • Guadeloupe 16 YO 1998-2014 43% #GM 21 (Damoiseau/Bellevue)(355 bottles)
  • Guadeloupe 16 YO 1998-2014 43% #GM 32 (Damoiseau/Bellevue)(355 bottles)
  • Guadeloupe 16 YO 1998-2014 43% #G 51 (Damoiseau/Bellevue)(300 bottles)
  • Guadeloupe 16 YO 1998-2015 43% #CG 91 (Damoiseau/Bellevue)
  • Guadeloupe 16 YO 1998-2015 43% #CG 1704 (Damoiseau/Bellevue)
  • Guadeloupe 17 YO 1998-2015 43% #CG 14 (Damoiseau/Bellevue)
  • Guadeloupe 18 YO 1998-2016 55.1% #GMB57 (Damoiseau/Bellevue, Denmark Only)
  • Guadeloupe 20 YO 1998-2018 43.1% #PLG79 (Pere Labat)
  • Guatemala 9 YO 2007-2016 43% #GOS16 (DARSA)
  • Guatemala 8 YO 2009-2017 58.5% #GDS12 (DARSA) (Denmark only)
  • Guatemala 8 YO 2009-2017 59.1% #??? (DARSA) (Denmark only)
  • Guyana 10 YO 2005-2015 58% #WPM 75 (PM Still, Denmark only)
  • Guyana 13 YO 2002-2015 59% #WPM 36 (PM Still, Denmark only)
  • Guyana 13 YO 2002-2015 58% #MPM 35 (PM Still)
  • Guyana 13 YO 2002-2015 43% #MPM 63 (PM Still)
  • Guyana 21 YO 1993-2015 56% #GU 4 (Uitvlugt Still, Denmark only)
  • Guyana 24 YO 1990-2015 58.1% #MEY 04 (EHP Still, Denmark only)
  • Guyana 12 YO 2003-2016 45% #MSG6 (Diamond)
  • Guyana 12 YO 2003-2016 45% #MSG15 (Diamond)
  • Guyana 12 YO 2003-2016 45% #MSG16 (Diamond)
  • Guyana 12 YO 2003-2016 45% #MSG17 (Diamond)
  • Guyana 10 YO 2005-2016 57.5% #MPM18 (Port Mourant, Romhatten only)
  • Guyana 18 YO 1997-2016 45% #MGA4 (Uitvlugt)
  • Guyana 18 YO 1997-2016 57.9% #MGA5 (Uitvlugt, Denmark only)
  • Guyana 27 YO 1988-2016 52.7% #MEC7 (Enmore, Denmark only)
  • Guyana 14 YO 2003-2017 43% #GDD40 (Diamond)
  • Guyana 9 YO 2008-2017 59% #GYD71 (Diamond, Mahlers Vinhandel DK only)
  • Guyana 11 YO 2007-2018 60% #Gxxxx (Armagnac finish)
  • Guyana 10 YO 2010-2018 43% #GPM51 (Port Mourant)
  • Guyana 29 YO 1988-2018 48% #GEN2 (Enmore)
  • Latino 5 YO 2010-2015 40% (15 g/L sugar)
  • Latino 6 YO 2010-2017 46% (finish Vosne-Romanee red wine cask)
  • Nicaragua 11 YO 2004-2016 69.1% #SN18 (Distillery unknown)
  • Nicaragua 17 YO 1997-2015 64.9% #NCR30 (Distillery unknown)
  • Nicaragua 12 YO 2005-2017 66% #NS10 (Distillery unknown)(Denmark only)
  • Oktoberum 5 YO (2016)
  • Panama 11 YO 2004-2015 60% #MRS 255 (Distillery unknown)(Denmark only)
  • Panama 11 YO 2004-2015 44% #MRS 263 (Distillery unknown)
  • Panama 11 YO 2004-2015 44% #MRS 322 (Distillery unknown)
  • Panama 11 YO 2004-2016 61.5% #PMD 43 (Distillery unknown)
  • Panama 9 YO 2008-2017 43% #PSC 8 (Distillery Unknown)
  • Panama 9 YO 2008-2017 43% #PSC 77 (Distillery Unknown
  • Panama 13 YO 2004-2017 56.9% #PS 99 (Distillery Unknown)
  • St. Lucia 13 YO 2002-2015 43% #SLD 84 (St. Lucia Distillers)
  • St. Lucia 13 YO 2002-2015 56.3% #SLD 46 (St. Lucia Distillers)(Denmark only)
  • Trinidad 16 YO 2003-2019 63.5% #TLBF15 (TDL)
  • Trinidad 13 YO 2005-2018 45% #TT035 (TDL)
  • Trinidad 15 YO 2003-2018 44% #TTW9 (TDL)
  • Trinidad 20 YO 1998-2018 59.8% #TTCR14 (Caroni)
  • Trinidad 23 YO 1993-2017 53.1% #TCC3 (Caroni)
  • Trinidad 25* YO 1991-2016 56.2% #TP8 (Caroni)
  • Trinidad 22 YO 1993-2016 48% #TC4 (Caroni)
  • Trinidad 16 YO 2000-2016 63.6% #TT 96 (TDL)
  • Trinidad 24 YO 1991-2015 56.3% #SC 2 (Caroni)
  • Trinidad 21 YO 1994-2015 57.8% #SC 707 (Caroni)
  • Trinidad 19 YO 1996-2015 53.2% #SC 1 (Caroni)
  • Trinidad 18 YO 1996-2015 61% #SCT 9 (Caroni)
  • Trinidad 18 YO 1996-2014 43% #SC 3 (Caroni) (456 bottles)
  • Trinidad 18 YO 1996-2014 43% #SC 2 (Caroni) (456 bottles)
  • Tricorne Unaged White Rum 2016 43% (Blend cane juice/molasses/arrack)
  • Venezuela 12 YO 2006-2018 43% VCA 1 (Corporation Alcoolés del Caribe (CADC))
  • Venezuela 12 YO 2006-2018 58% VCA 5 (Corporation Alcoolés del Caribe (CADC))
  • Venezuela 16 YO 2003-2019 63.5% VNT 61(Corporation Alcoolés del Caribe (CADC))
  • Veneragua 13 YO 2005-2018 45% (blend, 3 barrels Venezuela + 2 NIcaragua)
  • West Indies Blended 8 YO 2010-2018 40% (blend of Bdos, DR, Pan, Guy)

*Miscalculated as 26 YO on label

Asterix & Obelix

 No Responses »
Oct 022015
 

asterix

***

I challenge anyone to read the adventures of the two indomitable Gauls, Asterix and Obelix, and not bust out into a belly laugh at least once. Much like Herge’s Tintin, there’s a peculiar flavour to these illustrated graphic novels (for this is indeed what they are – it would be incorrect to deem them mere “comics”) which American illustrators of humour have, for the most part, lost or abandoned – the ability to write and draw a story that is more than just a four strip daily funny, and make it long, absorbing, hilarious and riveting, stocked with a pantheon of characters that not only act funny, talk funny, but are named funny.

As with Tintin, there are many favourites of the series, held by many people – I’ve always preferred the first ten or so myself, and for the purposes of this essay, I don’t think I’ll touch on any in particular, though Asterix in Britain is a perennial goodie and I always enjoyed Asterix and the Goths, Asterix in Switzerland, Asterix and the Great Crossing, Asterix the Gladiator and Asterix at the Olympic Games.

A short review of the situation is as follows. It is 50BC. Ceasar has conquered Gaul. All? No…one small village of (you got it) indomitable Gauls holds out against the roman legions by virtue of their druid’s ability to brew a potion that grants them superhuman strength. So the Romans surround the village with four fortified camps named (and here we start with the naming) Torturum, Aquarium, Laudanum and Compendium. There are various Romans throughout the series with awesome names like Chrismus Bonus, Marcus Ginantonicus, Gluteus Maximus, Arteriosclerosis, Gastroenteritus…I could go on but you get the picture.

The Gauls in this village all have names ending in “-ix” (a nod to Vercingetorix, a real Gaulish chieftain who surrendered to Caesar), and are a smorgasbord of rib ticklers: Vitalstatistix, the chief; Fulliautomatix the blacksmith (son of Semiautomatix); Geriatrix, the oldest guy in the village who somewhat improbably has a young and lusciously drawn, never-named wife; Unhygienix the fishmonger (son of Unhealthix) with a wife named Bacteria…and of course the titular hero Asterix, Getafix the druid and Dogmatix, the tree-loving little dog Asterix’s best friend Obelix loves.

These laughing, fighting Frenchmen go on to have some of the most unusual adventures in comic books, and in the ancient world – they go (variously) to Switzerland, Britain, America, Spain, Germany, Corsica, Paris, Rome, the Olympic Games, Egypt, even the Middle East – and in each case they meet a colourful cast of supporting characters who are uniquely drawn and have quirky characteristics of their own that reflect something of their national cliches. Take, for example the Brits and their stiff upper lip and love for having a cuppa in the middle of a battle; the Egyptians and their predilection for obscure (and ginormous) architectural monuments. I’ll grant you that stereotyping is rife throughout the series – but I see it more as a gentle nudge and wink from the authors than anything malicious or demeaning.

Part of what gives these adventures their charm is the ongoing gags throughout the various iterations: Obelix’s continual efforts to be allowed to drink some magic potion (since he fell into the cauldron as a baby he is permanently super-strong and Getafix won’t allow him to have any more); the inevitable thrashing, bashing or stringing-up which Cacofonix the bard gets any time he wants to sing; the rivalry between Unhygienix and Fulliautomatix; Obelix’s love of collecting legionary helmets (with or without Romans still attached) and eating boars; the pirates on the high seas whose father-son team (never named) have these hilarious conversations (the crippled son always speaks in pig latin), occasionally interspersed with gloomy commentary from the black lookout in the crow’s nest who keeps getting a “sinking feeling.”

Whether you accept and love the series depends on your sense of humour, I think, and whether you feel comics or colourful graphic novels of this kind are a suitable vehicle for slapstick and gags and puns and laughs. My recommendation would be to get them, and keep them and reread them every so often, and share generously. For my money, they are among the funniest, best examples of comic book humour ever drawn, and every time I read one, I feel myself shedding a few years, and becoming a kid again, and laughing just as hard as the first time.

 

Opinion: In Defense of Rum Bloggers

 8 Responses »
Aug 252015
 

Bloggers 1

Bloggers 2

 

“I don’t read a lot of blogs because, well, most of them are written by people who aren’t qualified to piss in the ocean,” remarked Ed Hamilton on his blog The Ministry of Rum on July 7th 2015. To say I was surprised at such a blanket indictment of the majority of the rum blogging community would be an understatement. He’s not the only one to make such a statement in the recent past: when I wrote a five part series on how to start reviewing rums earlier this year, in an effort to provide some advice on new bloggers who often cease operation after a short while, I got a snarling response from another writer, who suggested that there are too many incompetents writing as it is (myself among them) and more should not be encouraged.

I simply don’t understand this attitude. It originates from persons who themselves write a lot, opiniate even more, and have a large body of words on their sites (which obviously pass muster by their own definitions of “qualified”), yet they seem to feel that almost all other websites, discussions, opinions and reviews, are a waste of internet space. I can sort of understand Sir Scrotimus Maximus in Retirement Land, since he despises everyone (and spews a vomitus of condescending and negative opinions just about every day), but Mr. Hamilton, for whom I have a great deal of respect, is a more puzzling enigma. Especially given his well-known dedication to rum, and the oft expressed moan abut rum not having enough visibility and fighting an uphill battle against other more established tipples.

To make my own position clear: I myself have nothing but distaste for short, ignorant, non-knowledgable click-bait written by writers for online spirits magazines (see here, here, here, here and here for some examples). Too often they display an abysmal ignorance of rums in general, and make lists of rums that would be amusing if they weren’t so uninspiring. But I don’t think this is what Sir Scrotimus or Mr. Hamilton were referring to. Nor do I believe that they are talking about news stories. Or cocktail sites and writers for them. No, when they refer to monkey mutterings and blogs, they are talking about reviewers. And since I’m one of them, I think I’ll take up cudgels on behalf of myself and others in my field.

To begin with, who qualifies as a “good” writer? For my money, this would be someone who writes with prose that engages the reader; who has a good understanding of the industry; who crafts decent tasting notes on the rums that are tried; expresses an informed opinion; has a body of rums to refer to, and self-evidently is involved in not only increasing his own knowledge but that of his readers.

Are there truly none of such writers around? Sure there are. Henrik from Denmark keeps getting better all the time and that’s in his second language; Marco Freyr from Barrel Aged Mind in Germany is a historian par excellence with enormously detailed articles on the rums he tries; Josh Miller of Inuakena writes well, tastes well and goes far afield whenever it pleases him; Cyril from duRhum fills in with great reviews of more obscure fare, especially agricoles; Steve James of Rum Diaries writes great reviews in depth; The Fat Rum Pirate writes accessible notes for the common man with lots of opinions and off-hand facts, primarily for the UK crowd, and lovingly tends to the low-end and mid-range. I enjoy Laurent’s work on Les Rhums de l’homme à la Poussette. Dave Russell of the Rum Gallery is a long running stalwart, and while Chip and I happily trade emails back and forth about our differences in opinion, the man does put out a welter of rum reviews that North Americans in particular take seriously.

Why do we need more of such people?

Because, dear reader, there still aren’t enough. Not really. Excluding cocktail blogs which speak to rum as a secondary enterprise, there are less than twenty focused rum reviewing sites in the whole world. I can’t think of many which are run on a commercial basis. And yet we constantly complain about rum taking second place to whisky in the minds of the tippling class, not having exposure, people not “getting” the variety it represents. Well, having more writers who raise the profile would therefore be a good thing, wouldn’t it?

It is online writers like Johnny, Cyril, Dave and Wes who are spearheading the fight against improper labeling, undisclosed sugar and additives and outright deceptive marketing practices. Would less reviewers have the same effect? Not at all. Because then we’d just be left with the polarizing negativisms of Sir Scrotimus.

We also need more writers because they are the ones who call attention to the rums of the world in a time of declining advertising budgets and quality magazine writing about rums. Yes there’s the RumPorter, and yes there’s Got Rum…but there are scores of such publications on whisky or wine, so we’re supposed to be happy with a mere handful on our tipple of choice? Hell no. We need dozens, not just a couple. Reviewers, bloggers and online writers fill this void. You can disagree with what they write, but at least they’re out there providing information. Why would having fewer somehow be seen as better?

Even assuming the statements of these two gentlemen were correct (and I dispute that) they both ignore the obvious question: where are the “qualified writers,” if the ones I mentioned above aren’t representative? No please, educate me. Who are they? For whom do they write? What are their blogs? Are they active and engaged in the rumworld? Are they the few book authors who exist? To toss out generalized comments about the chattering underclass who supposedly don’t know what they’re doing seems grossly unfair to me, without listing them and their opposite numbers who are worth reading. If you are going to use your platform to diss someone, by all means provide a list of those who do fit your personal criteria. More than two, please, and in the same post as your takedown, not elsewhere on your site. Negatives are one thing, but if you have no positives to contribute then your argument lacks substance. More, there’s a puritan ethos of understated censorship wafting through those two comments I find disturbing…y’know, Write what I like, or you’re an idiot.

I think that part of the issue is that such qualified reviewers are somehow expected to spring to life overnight like Athena from Zeus’s brow, and wow us with their Kiplingesque prose, incredible depth of knowledge and scintillating wit, right out of the gate. But in a world where nobody (well, almost nobody) gets paid for writing about rum – and to my mind the greater proportion of rum writers write for love, not money – I think it says a lot for the dedication and devotion of rum aficionados who are also reviewers that they do as much as they do for free. This is somehow a bad thing?

So it’s my considered opinion that the two comments above do the writing community a disservice. Yes there is an unmet need for more writers who provide their own perspective and writing style and knowledge. Yes we could use some more professional authors who do more than just blog about cocktails and the tiki culture. We could have more reference materials and other information out there that raises the bar for the expected knowledge of a rum blogger. We need that kind of talent for those who write about rums specifically, not as an afterthought or a sideshow. And the reviewers and bloggers that are so casually dismissed, are the ones that provide, as best they can, this level of commitment and growing expertise. Because nobody else is.

In summary, it’s a shame that opinion makers and commentators like these two, instead of trying to raise the bar with mentorship and good advice for the new blood and existing writers, resort to such unfortunate takedowns. But you know, Mr. Hamilton called it right: he doesn’t read those he doesn’t like. Maybe there’s a word of wisdom for us all in that.

Nine Rums from Out Of Left Field

 No Responses »
Aug 162015
 

Want a rum that says a big FU to your opinion? Here’s one, and then eight more.

***

It annoys me no end, seeing the same boring rundown of standard table rums extolled by journalists who don’t bother to do the most elementary research on what a good rum actually is, and make no effort to take the subject seriously. Earlier in 2015, in response to yet another vanilla listing of same-old-blah-blah-blah-rums-you-should-try written by someone who “discovered” rums on a weekend Caribbean safari (or was that the one put together by a hack who only now realized rum was a drink worth checking out?), I asked rather peevishly why a list of crazy rums you’ve never heard about wasn’t issued by some enterprising writer for an online rag someplace. After waiting around for a while, getting older, with no response, I realize maybe they were waiting for one of us real writers. Oh. Okay. For my rag, then…

Note – just because they are listed here, does not mean I entirely love these rums…just that they are really at odds with more standard rum profiles. You can buy them, sure. However, let’s not pretend they’ll entirely be to your tastes. They showcase all the illogic and weirdness and wonderful breadth of rum, though, and there’s nothing at all bad about that.

1. D3S_1657Clairin Sajous

Come on, was this ever even in doubt? This friggin rum is utterly nuts, impractical to a fault, unaged, white and simply flat out amazing. The Casimir and the Vaval clairins are sprigs cut from the same tree, and just about as weird. That gunpowder and wax nose, the amazing taste. Gave it points for sheer originality.

 

D3S_89692. Rum Nation White Pot Still 57%

Jamaican badassery in a sleek sexy bottle. Pungent, strong and estery, Rum Nation took a deep breath, threw the dice, ran with it, and I think it paid off.

 

 

D3S_7054

3. SMWS 3.4 Barbados 10 Year Old

All right, I admit it, this is tough to find even if you’re a member of the SWMS. And not that many of it were made. But heavens above what a great, snarling, amazing rum for its strength. It got the highest score I ever gave a drink that powerful. Wish I could find the “Marmite” 3.5.

 

D7K_12984. La Occidental Guayabita del Pinar

Leaving aside the issue of whether this Cuban softie is a rum or not (I said it was), here is one of the few flavoured rums I ever tasted that I liked…perhaps because it is made differently rather than having spices chucked into it like Emeril was having a bad hair day. It remains (somewhat to my surprise) one of the most re-visited posts on this site. I wonder why.

 

Cadenhead5. Cadenhead’s Classic Green Label Demerara 12 Year Old

The peat is strong with this one, I grumbled when I sampled this rum, and still don’t care much for it. Whatever. If you ever wanted to see a the result of a tussle between an Octomore and Port Mourant, here’s your chance. There are many anoraks who swear by it, mind you.

 

 

bundie6. Bundaberg Reserve

Quiet, all you there in the peanut gallery. I know that Bundie is seen as a balm to exiled Aussies, and a butt of constant jokes from, about and by the residents of Oz. The question is not whether you like it neat…more of what a rum can be when it takes not a sharp left turn, but a hundred and eighty about-face, and then smacks you a good hard one on the schnozz. Honestly, I think it’s more tequila than rum. Still, you can’t deny its originality, and you’ll not mistake it for many others.

 

D3S_68467. BBR Fiji 8 Year Old

The one Berry Bros. & Rudd rum I didn’t care for. Was like a paint thinner, unbalanced, weird to taste, and a rum that can only be approached with head-scratching, jowl-quivering perplexity, wondering how a minor god does not rise up and smite it stone dead. That said, I felt that way about it because it simply, defiantly, obnoxiously said “I shall not conform to your expectations of me.” That alone might warrant a taste or two.

 

D3S_90748. JM 15 Year Old

I’m still coming to grips with what exactly was it about this rum that made it so memorable, so strange, so intriguing. It was off-kilter, sure, but not batsh*t crazy different…just enough for me to keep it in my taste memory bank and recall it with bewilderment from time to time, still, after all these months, trying to pin down its haunting and elusive weirdness. Yeah, I liked it.

 

clark's9. Clarke’s Court Pure White Rum – Bush Variation

You will never find this rum in the bars of the east or west or anywhere except its own squat. The already odd white pot still rum was added to by some enterprising bushman-wannabe in Grenada, who cheerfully dumped in bark, twigs, berries and a plump worm (I kid you not), and then sold it to my crazy friend in Toronto. And mad as this may seem, all that crap made the rum even better. Every time I see myself starting to get snooty about additives in rum, here’s one that jogs my memory and makes me laugh, and realize that sometimes, it isn’t all a bad thing.

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A postscript: I do not necessarily recommend that you go after these rums just because I’ve written about them (or because you have a kink in your own mind that such rums would appeal to). What I am saying is that they are rums which go their own way; have a screw loose somewhere; they do not adhere those more familiar tastes to which we are accustomed. Some are good, some not so much, at least one is just a rampage of laughably ridiculous insanity, and all are absolute blasts to drink.

Now that’s how a list should be written, dammit.

Ocean’s Distillery

 1 Response »
Jul 022015
 

Oceans 0

Ocean’s is a relatively new rum making outfit based in Zaragoza, Spain, beginning its life in 2012. Essentially they are an independent bottler, but with ambition: they have ageing warehouses the Ayala Valley (Basque Country, Spain) and La Palma Island in the Canaries. They have various seven year old rums, the limited editions, and some craft stocks from Jamaica, Trinidad and other places. So you can tell these boys mean business and want to be around for the long haul.

Small rum companies – from independent bottlers who take favoured casks and put them out the door to actual producers who go the whole hogshead from cane to carafe – tend to have one dedicated, enthusiastic entrepreneur at the helm, in the early years. All three of the companies I have written about so far conform to that idea: Velier, Rum Nation and Nine Leaves. Even the larger operations like DDL, Bacardi, Appleton, Flor de Cana etc, can be traced back to a single dedicated rumster whose drive, determination and dedication created and defined the future organization.

So it is with Ocean’s, a rum making concern still making its baby steps, an independent bottler beginning its official life in 2012 when Santiago Bronchales founded the company.

Oceans 4

The company is run by four business partners, three being investors, and Mr. Bronchales making the operational decisions: he is 36 years old (as of 2015), and a native of Zaragoza (in Aragon, Spain), splitting his time between Villajoyosa (Alicante, Spain, where he lives) and working in La Palma Island in the Canaries. Something like the sharp dog-leg left turn taken by the maestro ronero for Cuba’s Havana Club brand Don Jose Navarro in the 1970s, Mr. Bronchales studied Computer Science initially, but for reasons known only to himself, decided to change to study Oenology, which had become a passion of his. After having been working for some years as a winemaker, he began doing some experiments on the different process of distillation and inevitably, as he put it to me, got closer and closer to the world of rum.

Mr. Bronchales has been involved with the rum world since 2007. In that year, while working as a spirits consultant (and before that as a winemaker and brewmaster), he was approached and offered a position to lead a new project: to create a brand of rum meant to compete with the mastodon in the room, Zacapa. He didn’t think they were serious at first but they were. So he went to work in the Dominican Republic with the rum producer Oliver & Oliver, and after two year of market research decided to develop a range of rums with the aim of offering different rum ages and tastes. In this way he was able to have a hand in creating the Opthimus line (the 15, 18, 21 and 25 años solera rums), and remained there until April of 2012.

Like with most people who have a personal vision, he decided to branch out and follow his own path. He had been buying fresh sugar cane distillates since 2009, with the sole intention of experimenting with his own maturation philosophy and process, and to see whether it was possible to make a 100% natural rum, with no additives or preservatives or anything else. “Just playing with rum, wood and time,” he remarked to me. And thus was born the Ocean’s Rum of the “Singular Blend” concept, in pursuance of which he set up his own company.

Oceans 3

The basic idea was simple: rather than single-island or single-estate rums such as most craft bottlers were making and selling, he drew on his expertise in blending, and sourced different sugar cane distillates from many different producers from all over the world, trying to create taste in a natural way. If you recall, I had some reservations about the concept – the Atlantic edition had seven different rums in it, and I didn’t think it quite clicked, but Mr. Bronchales explained it to me this way:

“Why so many different origins? Easy! If you want to cook a very good, tasty and pleasant meal, you need to use many different ingredients and make a selection of the highest quality among them, right? It is the same for me. If I want to create taste, I have to use different ingredients of the highest quality. In this way, we have our three rums of seven years old (fully cask matured), into only new barrels. All of them, blends from Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana and Spain, in diverse percentages. Thus, creating three different tastes of rum: Mellow, Tasty and Deep.”

Oceans 1

This kind of blending approach to making rum is also behind the three aged top-of-his-line rums named after three great oceans: “In the case of the Oceans (Atlantic, Pacific and Indian), what I make is a selection of special barrels, with some peculiarities that make me feel strange and new sensations. Unique impressions that make me feel alive. Atlantic 1997 (the 1997 is the date of distillation of the youngest rum in that blend) is a blend of 16 selected barrels from Barbados, Guyana, Belize, Trinidad, Jamaica and Martinique, and even some drops of Dominican Republic. Each is a matured rum from one producer (and usually a solera) and selected, matured a second time by Ocean’s, blended and then finished by myself.” In the case of the Atlantic, he used barrels of red wine from D.O. Somontano in the north of Spain, to do the finishing for a couple of years.

Rums are sourced without prejudice and can consist of either molasses or cane-juice distillates, from pot still or column still … the man plays no favourites. No additives or preservatives or colour agents are included, and it’s all natural. Mr. Bronchales has his own personal technique to give some natural kind of sweetness to the rums he makes: it consists on putting about 25 litres of pure unfermented sugar cane juice into a barrel, letting it sit for a short time, then emptying it and lighting a fire inside just to warm the wood and caramelize what remains soaked in the barrel, but not enough to char the staves themselves.

There’s no question that the technique of blending and barreling is somewhat different from that practiced by other craft bottlers, most of who are much more interested in rums reflecting specific styles or countries. But Ocean’s is committed to the path it has set for itself: to continue focusing its efforts on the development and the detailed study of alternative maturation techniques that allow them to improve the traditional methods for the rum-ageing process. They are really aware of the effects that climate, wood and time generate in rum, and this in turn leads to them deeply studying cooperage and woods, in an effort to understand the connection that occurs between wood and rum.

Future plans are to continue issuing the seven year old rums (Mellow, Tasty and Deep), release the Pacific and Indian limited editions, and to keep an eye on some single cask, country specific rums which were considered quite special, but with no planned issue date.

You can tell Mr. Bronchales, very much like Mr. Takeuchi of Nine Leaves, is one of these guys who goes beyond merely ageing and tasting and then bottling a rum. He likes to examine the history and philosophy of his favoured libation. He wants to reinvigorate the rum making traditions of the Canary Islands with his own style, and he wants to take craft rums in a direction not many others have, blending research about the intricate minutiae of ageing with rock solid rum-making fundamentals, all while adding just a pinch of crazy to the mix.

And I mean that in a good way, because I’m agog with admiration for anyone who can dare mix a bunch of rums from as far afield as the Java, Swaziland and Fiji, and hope to make that work. It may not come together, and it may all crash and burn, but not for the want of trying. You really have to respect that kind of commitment in a rum maker, from any country, at any time. And maybe raise a glass to their success.

 

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A list of rum which Ocean have produced is below

  • Mellow & Singular 7 Year Old Rum
  • Tasty & Singular 7 Year Old Rum
  • Deep & Singular 7 Year Old Rum
  • Triple S Special Edition – Barbados (single cask – December 2016)
  • Triple S Special Edition – Trinidad (single cask – December 2016)
  • Triple S Special Edition – Jamaica (single cask – December 2016)
  • Triple S Special Edition – Dominica (single cask – December 2016)

The 200th Review

 4 Responses »
Feb 052015
 

200

 

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Who would have thought, that when Liquorature first started as a small club in 2009, that the rum reviews portion of its website would split off into its own, let alone ever surpass a hundred reviews? With the review of Rivière du Mât Rhum Vieux Traditionnel Millésime 2004, some three years after passing the 100th write-up and more than five years into it, I have reached the next milestone, the 200th, and I have to admit, it would have been faster if I had not stopped writing for a year when I moved to the Middle East. It’s not the best in the world by volume (and never will be), yet it still gives me a small sense of accomplishment to have even done this much.

The opening of this site in 2013 was a major shift in the shared review philosophy we had followed on Liquorature. It was inevitable: like anyone who produces a fair amount of mental product on his own time and with his own dime, I wanted a display case for that and that alone (I’m not much of a community person and don’t do things by committee — the “Lone” in my title is not an accident, and exists on several levels of meaning). The reactions and feedback from our small subculture and miscellaneous passers-by have been generally positive and gratifying, in some cases surprisingly so. Even when I was on an extended absence in 2013/2014, the hits kept ticking over fairly constantly (if minimally), suggesting that there was a small audience for my eclectic and eccentric writing. I have made no major changes to the site design-wise, except for allowing people to find a rum by name, by maker and by country — I deemed ages, colour categories and styles to be too limiting, if not actually vague, and so stuck with simplicity.

Two developments on the 1st One Hundred which I noted at the time and which continue were the adding of scores and the cessation of accepting, let alone soliciting, industry samples, a policy which I have followed with exactly two exceptions ever since. I don’t pretend this makes me better than anyone, it simply speaks to my fear of undue influence in the latter case, and (in the former) my desire for calibration and rankings in a collection that is now quite extensive. Much to my chagrin, I found that descriptions alone didn’t tell the tale of any given rum, and developed a scoring system that worked for me, and which I use to this day. In the coming year, I know I will discard the 0-100 rating with 50 as a median, and move towards a relatively more standardized system whereby 90+ is top end, and an average score will fall around 70-80…I just have to recalculate and recalibrate two hundred reviews to do it, and that’s no small task. (Update March 2015 – I have now rescored and recalibrated all reviews to fall in line with the more accepted 50-100 system)

Also: I still write the same way, still put as much as I feel like into a review, and provide as much information as possible in a one-stop-shopping approach for the reader. I am in awe of others’ pithy one-liners, and think Serge’s haikus of tasting notes on WhiskyFun are brilliant, but I lack their abilities in this area and must play to my own predispositions and abilities.

As time went on, my palate changed and moved more towards stronger rums. At the very beginning I decried rums with too much burn and whisky-like profiles. This approach had to be modified as I tasted more and more and built up a collection I was able to use to cross-taste. I was already thinking that 40% was too limiting back in 2011, but in 2012 I went to Berlin and bought and tasted the rums of a spectacular company called Velier for the first time, and they convinced me that full-proof, cask strength rums in the 50-65% range, when made right, deserved their own place in the sun. In 2014 that opinion was solidified at the Berlin RumFest, where so many rums were full proofed that finding a forty percenter was actually not that easy. These days, given my proximity to Europe, that’s most of what I can get anyway, and I’m not unhappy with it.

I also gained a fondness for agricoles and their lighter, cleaner profiles, though they will be unlikely to ever surpass my love for Mudland products, good as they are. The really good agricoles from the pre-1990s are, alas, very rare and quite pricey. Still, I persevere – aside from Dave Russell’s Rum Gallery, too few reviewers outside France and Italy (L’homme a la Poucette and DuRhum come to mind) really push out or have serious quantities of agricole reviews. So there’s definitely some opportunity to champion them, I think, and who can call themselves rum reviewers and ignore such a wide swathe of product? Availability might be the problem: Josh Miller from Inu a Kena bemoans his selection in the USA, for example and I know Chip in Edmonton has the same issue.

I started a new and very occasional series called “The Makers” inspired by a conversation the Hippie and I had many years ago, and which I felt had real potential to provide more information to the reader. With whatever information I can glean online and from my books and conversations, I try to put together a biography of the companies that make rums, and (if at all possible) a list of all their products. To that I added another section called “Opinions” because there are many issues confronting the rum industry and general and bloggers in particular, upon which I at least want to comment. Still a work in progress.

The one other aspect of the experience of reviewing rum and rhum that has taken off in the last couple of years is the friends I’ve made, the contacts. To say I have been startled by this development is an understatement because in the first years I worked almost in isolation…but pleased and touched as well. Henrik, Cyril, Marco, Francesco, Luca, Fabio, Curt, Maltmonster, Gregers, Steve, Josh, Chip and all the others… muchas gracias to you all. I get helpful comments, offers to share samples, clarifications, info and all kinds of assist when stuck for a detail or a path forward. Rum Folks…they’re great guys, honestly.

So here’s looking forward to my next hundred, then. I know I’m playing a catch-up game with the guys like Serge, Dave and Chip, and it’s not always and only about the numbers. The important thing is that it remains interesting to me, I like the writing and the research and the back-and-forth…and I still revel the pleasure at discovering a really great rum, previously unknown, about which I can craft an essay that hopefully makes people think about it, appreciate it and maybe laugh a little.

Cheers to all of you who’ve read this far and this long..

The RumWorld’s Movers & Shakers, Past & Present

 2 Responses »
Jan 292015
 
Photo copyright morealtitude.wordpress.com

Photo copyright morealtitude.wordpress.com

In December 2014, Ian Burrell put a survey up on FB’s The Global Rum Club Page. It read: “If you had to pick 5 people who have been a major influence for the rum category, who would you pick ? It can be brand founder, distiller, blender, brand ambassador, bartender, promoter, blogger, marketer, etc. Vote for your pick or add your own major influence. I’ll throw 5 (pre 1950’s) into the mix (in no order) Don Facundo Bacardi Massó ; Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt AKA Don the Beachcomer; Admiral Edward Vernon aka Old Grog; Constantino Ribalaigua Vert and James Man (ED & F Man)”

I both love and hate lists. Perhaps because I’m into the numbers game as part of my day job, I love the exactitude of things nailed down and screwed shut, copper-bottomed and airtight. And so I devour top ten lists, readers favourites, drinker’s grails and all the various classifiers we humans enjoy creating so as to rank the objects of our passion. As a reviewer of rum, I dislike them intensely. Because in any subjective endeavour – be it art, literature, film, food, drink, the perfect significant other – taste and experience and quirks of personality dictate everything, and what one person might enjoy and declaim from the rooftops, another vocally despises (both with flashing eyes and elevated blood pressure). So for me to create a list of any kind is problematic, and I try not to.

Still, this one piqued my interest. Until I saw it, I sort of thought I was reasonably knowledgeable about matters of the cane (even if it’s possible I’m the only one, in the country currently called “home”). But as I went down the list, I could tell that I was as green as a shavetail louie, and my own knowledge, while extensive, couldn’t come near to figuring out who all these people were, or how they could rank in terms of influence. And of course, loving a challenge, I decided to create a small glossary for that one person who might have a question. Indulge my sense of humour as I go along…I’m kinda stoked up on hooch-infused coffee right now.

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Don Facundo Bacardi Masso – you’re kidding right? Who doesn’t know the Catalan-born founder of Bacardi, the bête noir of those who prefer premium rums, that guy who founded the company which whips up a gajillion barrels of dronish tipple a year, and has a market cap that eclipses the GDP of small nations.

Don the Beachcomber – actually named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, hailing from Texas, he was the founding father of tiki restaurants, bars and nightclubs, often with a Polynesian flavour. A bootlegger and bar-owner (he opened Don’s Beachcomber Café in 1933 in Hollywood), he was increasingly referred to by the name of that bar. He actually changed his name several times to variations of this, until finally settling on Donn Beach. He was a lover and ardent mixer of potent rum cocktails, God love him. Supposedly created the Zombie cocktail, Navy Grog, Tahitian Rum Punch, Mai Tai and others. Trader Vic was a competitor of his (the rivalry was reputedly amicable). Died in 1989

Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron – much like Don the Beachcomber, Victor Jules Bergeron Jr., a California native, founded a chain of Polynesian themed restaurants, which he named after his nom de guerre, “Trader Vic,” the first one way back in 1932 as a pub, which moved into alcohol in a big way as a as soon as Prohibition ended (that one was called Hinky Dink’s, renamed Trader Vic’s in 1936 and it did not have the tropical décor and flavour it later acquired). The first franchised “Trader Vic’s” restaurant/bar opened in 1940 in Seattle. It supposedly created the franchise model which many other restaurants – not the least MacDonald’s – subsequently emulated. It hit its high point in the 50s and 60s when the Tiki culture fad was at its height. Both The Trader and the Beachcomber claim to have invented the Mai Tai. There are a line of rums of the same name that are readily available in the US.

Ian Burrell – London based drinks enthusiast with his own bar not too far from Camden Town. Instrumental in organizing the annual UK Rumfest, and holds the Guinness Record for largest single tasting event (in 2014). And he started this list going. I meant to go visit his rum bar in December that year and hoist a few rarities with him, but got drunk on Woods 100 and ended up in Greenwich.

Ernest Hemmingway – Also known as “Papa” Hemmingway; journalist, war correspondent, writer, deep-sea fisherman, Nobel Prize winning author of superbly spare, masculine tales. Popularized rum and rum cocktails during his later life when he resided in Cuba, with the amusing side-effect of having every Cuban rum – and quite a few others – claiming to be his favourite and the one he liked best. Alas, he killed himself in 1960, but one hopes he had a good rum or three before deciding there was no better rum to be had and he’d better go out on a high note.

Christopher Columbus – nope, not my Italian neighbour across the way, nor a film director of fluff puff pieces. A Genoese mapmaker from the 15th century who legend has it, was looking for India when he accidentally bumped into the Caribbean islands in 1492, and promptly named the natives “Indians.” Sure glad he wasn’t looking for Turkey.

Admiral Edward Vernon (“Old Grog”, died 1757) – popularized the sadly discontinued practice of issuing rum diluted with lemon juice on board Royal Navy ships partly to ward off vitamin C deficiency (scurvy), to make shipboard drinking water more palatable, and – we can hope – to boost morale. You could argue he therefore created the first cocktail. We still, call rum “grog” because of his being affectionately named after his frock coat, called a Grogram. As a nice bit of trivia, George Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, was named after him.

Aeneas Coffey – inventor (or perfecter) of the single column still in 1830 — he enhanced a previous 1828 design of Robert Stein’s , and this led directly to the industrial mass-production of rum; previously, pot stills were the main source of rum production, but suffered from higher costs, wide batch variation and small batch sizes of lower alcoholic content. The Coffey still addressed all these issues and kicked off the explosion of rum production (and, one can argue, the 20th century resurgence in craft pot still products). I suspect he was more interested in whisky than in rum, but nobody’s perfect.

Constantino Ribalaigua Vert – Catalan immigrant who began working in the famous Floridita fish restaurant and cocktail bar in old Havana, back in 1914…four years later he became the owner. Constantine is on this list because he invented what is one of the most famous rum cocktails ever made, the Daiquiri, somewhere in the 1930s, and it became inextricably linked with Floridita’s, which even today is known as La Cuna del Daiquiri. The bar became known for producing highly skilled cantineros whose expertise lay in crafting cocktails made with fresh fruit juices and rum, which he may have been instrumental in promoting. Hemmingway supposedly frequented the joint.

Homère Clément – founder of one of Martinique’s better known distilleries and rum houses, Clemente, which makes superlative agricoles to this day. Clemente was mayor of La Francois and purchased a prestigious sugar plantation Domaine de l’Acajou in the 1880s, just when the introduction of sugar beets was decimating the Caribbean sugar industry. He instigated the practice of using sugar cane juice to create rhum agricole, and modeled his rhums after the brandy makers and distillers of Armagnac in southwest France. I haven’t done enough research to test the theory, but Old Homere might have saved the French sugar islands from utter ruin with his rhum.

Jeff “Beachbum” Berry – Jeff is a bartender, author, contributor and cocktail personality who specializes in cocktails and Tiki culture; thus far he’s written six books on vintage Tiki drinks and cuisine, and he is referred to by the Los Angeles Times as “A hybrid of street smart gumshow, anthropologist and mixologist.” He’s created original cocktail recipes and been published in many trade, liquor, bartending and cocktail magazines. He doesn’t exclusively focus on rum, but it’s certainly a part of his overall interest, and he has raised the profile of rums in the published world like few others have.

Richard Seale – 3rd generation rum-maker; owner and manager of 4-Square distillery in Barbados, and therefore the maker of rums like Doorly’s and 4-Square brands, as well as providing barrels for many craft makers in Europe. He provided the initial distillate for St Nicholas Abbey, as they waited for their own stocks to mature. Has become a global rum icon both as a result of championing pure rums and decrying adulteration, and his collaborations with Velier.

Hunter S. Thompson – No idea why he would be on this list, except insofar as he is the author of “The Rum Diary” which is less about rum than it is about a lustful, jealous men stumbling through life in an alcoholic daze, indulging in violence and treachery at every turn (much like my Aunt Clothilde after a pub crawl). Of course, Thompson was known for imbibing colossal amounts of coke and alcohol (he was, like many young authors of the time, trying to copy the uber-mensch lifestyle of Hemmingway), so maybe this is where the connection arises. As a man with influence on rum as a whole, I’d say he’s more road kill than idol.

Rumporter – publisher of a French language magazine “Rumporter” which is dedicated like few others to the culture of rum. Too bad there isn’t an English version around, but then, I grumbled the same thing about Luca’s book. Maybe I should learn a seventh language.

The average British Navy man – also known as a Jolly Jack Tar; he needs no further intro. Lovers of Navy rums, these boys, and retired or not, keep the names of Watson’s and Woods 100 alive and well in their memories. And mine.

Don Pancho Fernandez – well known Cuban maestro ronero who worked initially for Havana Club. Developed the Zafra line of rums that are a perpetual staple in many liquor cabinets. Additionally acclaimed for the work he has done in raising the quality and profile of Panamanian rums like Varela Hermanos’s Abuelo line, Panamonte, Rum Nation and his own line of Don Pancho. Also the man behind the irritatingly named, but better-than-you-think rum Ron De Jeremy. I met him briefly in 2014. Nice guy, very courtly.

Edward Hamilton and the Ministry of Rum webpage (combined entry) – founder of the Ministry of Rum website where many rum noobs (myself among them) got their start in networking with other rum lovers. Still a very good resource to start researching producers and distillers and rums in general. Ed is also the author of “Rums of the Eastern Caribbean,” and has recently issued the Hamilton line of rums. Holds tastings and seminars all over the place and began his own line of rums in 2014. As a guy who started to pull Rummies together into an online whole, his influence cannot be underestimated – almost all rum bloggers in some way derive from what he started. These days his website is moribund, as the FB page eclipsed it.

All The Poor Slaves – and damn right too. We should never forget the backbreaking labour under inhuman conditions that slaves had to undergo to work in the fields that allowed our ancestors to sweeten their tea and create rumbullion. It is the original sin of rum.

Bartender – a good bartender is the aristocrat of the working class, knows his stuff backwards and forwards, and can whip up any cocktail you want. A great one not only knows your first name, but that of all the rums on his shelf.

Dupré Barbancourt – Founder of the eponymous distillery and rum maker on Haiti. He was a Frenchman from the cognac producing region of Charente, immigrated to Haiti and founded the company in 1862. To this day, they make some phenomenal agricoles.

Don Jose Navarro – A former Professor of Thermodynamics (ask him, not me), Don Navarro is maestro ronero for Havana Club (the Cuban one, or the “real” one). We should all be lucky enough to be able to take a right turn from our day jobs like he did in 1971.

Peter Holland – Curator, writer and owner of the website “The Floating Rum Shack.” The gentleman attends tastings around the worlds, acts as a judge of rum festivals, and is a consultant to various companies in the field. His site deals with primarily rums and cocktails. Apparently he was in Berlin in 2014, just as Don Pancho, Rob Burr and some of my other correspondents were, but we passed like ships in the night and never met each other.

Martin Cate – A San Francisco-based rum and exotic cocktail expert who collects rum like a bandit, conducts seminars and judges rum and cocktail competitions around the world; aside from that, he’s the owner of Smuggler’s Cove San Francisco, which specializes in rum cocktails, and was named by the Sunday Times of London some time back, as one of the 50 greatest bars on earth; Drinks International Magazine thought so too…three years in a row, and several other magazines think the same. I’m beginning to think I should move and crash over at Josh Miller’s place. Or just across the road from the bar.

Robert Burr –A promoter and lover of rum (and Hawaiian shirts), he is the organizer of the premier North American rum expo, the Rum Renaissance in Miami. He and his wife and son publish “Rob’s Rum Guide”, as well as hosting the Rum Renaissance Caribbean Cruise. He created the collective of judges from around the world called the RumXPs and he travels around the world judging and consulting. I met him briefly in Berlin in 2014, but he didn’t recognize my hat, which is something I really have to work on.

Father Pierre Lebat – This should probably be spelled Pere Labat; I’ll assume we’re talking about the man, because there is a rhum by that name still made on Marie Galante (Guadeloupe), where a French missionary polymath called Jean-Baptiste Labat was stationed. He was a clergyman, mathematician, botanist, writer, explorer, soldier, engineer, landowner – and slaveholder (lest we get carried away with admiration). A Dominican friar, he became a missionary and arrived in Guadeloupe in 1696 at the age of 33. While he was the procurator-general of the Dominican convents in the Antilles, he was also an engineer working for the French government; in this capacity and as proprietor of his own estate on Martinique, Labat modernized and developed the sugar industry, building on the pot still of Jean-Baptiste Du Tetre (see below). His methods for manufacture of sugar remained in use for a long time. The white agricole produced on Marie-Galante is named after him.

Luca Gargano – an exploding comet in the skies of rum, Luca made his bones by sourcing what is arguably the best collection of Guyanese still-specific rums in existence, the largest surviving Trinidad Caroni hoard any one company possesses, and in between that, issuing rums at anything between 50-65% ABV. I speak only for myself when I say that he is upping everyone else’s game, and showing that there is a market for full proof rums, just as there is for that obscure Scottish drink. And he’s a great guy.

Pirates – These guys sang shanties, shivered their timbers, pillaged, raped and plundered (and were knighted in at least one case), and drank rum. Lots of it. They may be long gone, them and all their cutlasses and pistols and sailing ships (maybe they migrated to Somalia and the South China Sea), but their shades hang around and inform the culture of rum like nothing else.

Joy Spence – The Nefertiti of the Noble spirit, Joy is the creative force behind J. Wray & Nephew, who make Appleton Estate rums in Jamaica. Since we’ve all swigged Appleton rums for decades, I’m not sure there’s much I can add here, except to note she was the first female master blender ever, and that’s quite an accomplishment in a rather male-dominated industry. With degrees in Chemistry, she took a job as a developmental chemist with Estate Industries (they produced Tia Maria) but got bored and moved on to J. Wray and Newphew, which was right next door..and there she stayed ever since. Owen Tulloch, the master blender for JW&N at the time, took her under his wing and when he retired in 1997, she became the master blender herself. So her hand is behind many of the Appletons we know and admire today. You could argue that the Appleton 50 is her and Mr. Tulloch’s love child.

Captain Morgan – The rum or the pirate? The rum is a world famous spiced baby which in some cases is not too shabby at all, and to some extent sets the bar for decent (read “non-lethal spiced overkill”) flavoured rums. The pirate did himself well. Henry Morgan, who lived and freebooted across the Caribbean in the 17th century was a privateer, not a pirate (meaning he sailed and pillaged under letters of marque issued by the English crown). He acted as an agent to harass Spanish territories and shipping, taking a cut of all plunder and ransoms. Knighted in 1674 and made Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica in 1675. He was replaced in 1681 and then gained a rep for being extremely fat and extremely drunk and extremely rowdy, like many friends of mine (and they’re all fun to hang with). Died 1688. His connection with rum is tenuous at best – about all you can say is he was a licensed pirate and a drunk. Come to think of it, so is my lawyer.

Alexandre Gabriel – the force behind Cognac-Ferrand’s magnificent Plantation double-aged line of rums. Not all of them are top end, but many are, and they have been instrumental, along with other European craft bottlers, in raising the bar for rums in general. Mr. Gabriel defends his process of dosing Plantation rums with small amounts of sugar or additives to attain the desired taste profile, which has caused some flak in the current climate regarding sugar, of “disclose or dispose.” Bought WIRD in Barbados in 2017 and in doing so gained a stake in Longpond Distillery in Jamaica.

Christian Vergier – Cellar master of New Grove rums, which is based in Mauritius. And there was me thinking the gentleman dabbled only in wines. Not much I can say about man or rum, since I’ve never met either of them. I’m sure that will change.

Oliver Rums – Created by Juanillo Oliver a Catalan-Mallorcan immigrant to Cuba in the mid nineteenth century. After the revolution in 1959 the family departed, but later re-established a sugar plantation and rum making concern in the Dominican Republic in the 1990s. They make Opthimus, Cubaney and Quohrum rums with what is supposedly the original rum recipe of the founder.

Tito Cordero – who doesn’t love the Venezuelan rum range of Diplomatico? The Reserva Exclusiva in particular receives rave reviews across the board (although I can’t speak to the ultra premium Ambassador…yet). And it’s all due to this maestro ronero, who, like Joy Spence, has a background in Chemistry (chemical engineering to be exact). And, oh yeah, he received the 2011 Golden Rum Barrel award for Best Rum Master in the world. Not too shabby at all.

Andres Brugal – the founder of Brugal and Co from the Dominican Republic. Also a Catalan (what’s with all these roneros coming from Catalonia?), he migrated from Spain to Cuba and then to the Dominican Republic in the mid 1800s…but not before soaking up equal quantities of rum and expertise. He introduced the first dark rum from his company in 1888, and over a century later, his descendants repaid the favour by naming one of their top end rums the 1888 (I liked it a lot, as a totally irrelevant aside).

James Man – Ever since I bought my Black Tot bottle, I see references to Navy rums wherever I go. And so it is here: James Man was a sugar broker and barrel maker who in 1784 secured the exclusive contract to supply rum to the British Navy. And now, more than two centuries later, his descendants, running a company called ED&F Man still trade in sugar and molasses (they are a general merchant of agricultural commodities). By the way, Man held the rum contract for 186 years – although not exclusively so for that whole time – which ended on…yup, Black Tot Day.

Silvano Samaroli – Silvano, an Italian craft bottler who started with whisky in 1968, makes this list because he may have been the first bottler to source rum, age it and issue it under his on label as a craft product in its own right. To this day I have tasted few Samaroli rums (many of my correspondents wonder what my malfunction is), but what little I’ve tried says the man’s work is superb. He died in 2017, and Fabio Rossi and Luca Gargano are his intellectual heirs.

John Gibbons – a RumXP member, rum judge, bar-trawler, independent spirit ambassador, cocktail enthusiast and rum lover. Moved to UK in 2010. Started the website Cocktail Cloister (no updates since 2011) and the Glasgow Rum Club. Does not appear to have been very active since 2013, but maybe the XP page has simply not been updated. I’ve met him a few times in Berlin, a really cool dude.

Leonardo Isla De Rum – another XP member, Leonardo Pinto has been a rum enthusiast since 2008, and curates his rum-themed website Isladerum. Nothing unusual with all this; but Leonardo has gone a step further, developing the Italian Rum Festival (ShowRum) as well as acting as a consultant for brands that wish to enter the Italian market. Honestly, I feel like a rank amateur next to people with such commitment and drive.

Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī – this guys gets my vote for sure. A Persian polymath, doctor, chemist (or alchemist, if you prefer) and philosopher, who lived around 854-925 AD. Why is he influential, and why should he be in the list? Well, leave aside his contribution to experimental medicine (he wrote a pioneering books on smallpox and measles as well as treatises on surgery that became de rigeur for western universities in the middle ages); ignore his many philosophical books, his work in chemistry and his desire for factual information not tied to traditional dogma; but just consider that he created (or at least popularized) the forerunner of all modern distillation apparatus – (drum roll) the alembic. We may now know it as a pot still and he’s the guy who is credited with spreading its usage. I’ll drink to him.

Ron Matuselam – one of the best brands of rum coming out of the Dominican Republic, and, like others, an exile from Cuba after the revolution.

Pepin Bosch – The man who could be argued to have saved Bacardi…twice. Jose M. Bosch, who died in 1994, was born in Cuba, and married into the Bacardi family. He was instrumental in rescuing Bacardi from bankruptcy during the Depression, and again in the 1960s when Castro seized all the company’s assets. Mr. Bosch ran the company from 1944 to 1976, when he retired.

E&A Scheer – A Netherlands-based ship owning company formed in the 18th century, heavily involved in the triangular trade between Europe, the West Indies and Africa – they therefore were instrumental in shipping bulk rum to Europe, at a time when (pause for loud cheers) rum was the primary tipple, and whisky wasn’t. They were also involved in shipping Batavia Arrack from the Dutch East indies at that time. By the 19th century, the company specialized in just shipping rums and then started their own blending and bulk distillation processes. To this day, they still concentrate on this aspect of the business (dealing in distillates), though they have expanded into other shipping areas as well.

Retailer –where would we be without the retailers? Too bad most corner store Mom-and-Pops don’t know half of what they sell, or speak knowledgeably about it. But then there are more specialty shops like Berry Bros & Rudd, Willow Park, Kensington Wine Market, or Rum Depot, and these guys keep the flame of expertise burning. Online retailers are going great guns too (this is where I buy 90% of what I taste these days), and if Canada were ever to get its act together regarding postage, I know a lot of guys who would be buying a helluva a lot more.

Pat O’Brien – creator of the Hurricane cocktail in the 1940s (it’s a daiquiri relative), which he made in order to rid himself of low quality rum his distributors were forcing him to accept before they would sell him more popular whiskies. At the time O’Brien was running a tavern in New Orleans (it was known as “Mr. O’Brien’s Club Tipperary” and required a password to get in during Prohibition). It is still served in plastic cups (New Orleans allows drinking in public…but not from glass containers or glasses). The name of the cocktail derives from the shape of the glass it was originally served in which resembled a hurricane lamp. O’Brien’s still exists.

Bertrand-Francois Mahe de La Bourdonnais – (1699–1753) French Naval officer and administrator, who worked in the service of the French East India company, primarily in Mauritius and Reunion. His inclusion on this list stems from his introduction of a free enterprise system on the islands, and the concomitant launch of commercial sugar (and therefore rum) production. This generated great wealth for Mauritius and Reunion, and sugar and rum have remained pillars of their economies ever since.

Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre – (1610-1687) A French blackfriar and botanist, he spent eighteen years in the Antilles and wrote many books about indigenous people, flora and fauna. His written work created the concept of the “Noble Savage”. Why is he on this list? Because he designed a rudimentary pot still (an alembic variation) to process the byproducts of sugar mills on the French islands, and thereby indirectly spurred the development of agricole rhum production upon which Pere Labat built.

Lehman “Lemon” Hart – Like Alfred Lamb and James Man, a purveyor of Navy Rums in the 1800s and liked to boast that he was the first to get such a contract but I think his license, issued in 1804, is eclipsed by Man’s (above).

George Robinson – Another master blender/distiller makes the cut, deservedly so. George Robinson was the Big Kahuna at DDL in Guyana and was in the company for over forty years (he passed away in 2011 but DDL hasn’t gotten the message yet, because their El Dorado website still has him alive and kicking. Maybe they think he’s faking it). The man was a cricketer in his youth, always a path to glory in the West Indies; however, it was his ability to harness the lunacy of the various stills DDL possesses that made his reputation and places him here. RIP, squaddie.

Capt William McCoy – I’m hoping I have the real McCoy here because no glossary of rum could be complete without at least one or five pirates, in this case a bootlegger who paradoxically never touched alcohol. The guy was unique, that’s for sure: he called himself an honest outlaw, never paid money to organized crime, politicians or the law for protection. He thought the Prohibition was daft (as do I) and made it his mission to smuggle likker from the Caribbean. He finally got collared in international waters in 1923, spent less than a year in clink, and ended his smuggling activities. He died in 1948.

Helena Tiare Olsen – Ah, Tiare. Runs one of the most comprehensive, long running and detailed cocktail blogs out there. She does rum reviews (always with the angle of what it would do for a cocktail), and until Marco of Barrel Aged Thoughts took the crown, had one of the best online articles on the stills of Guyana. Her site is an invitation to browse, there’s so much stuff there. She attends various rumfests around the world as and when she finds the time.

Daniel Nunez Bascunan – Danish blogger, rum enthusiast, owner of RumClub bar in Copenhagen and micro-brewer. Don’t know the gentlemen personally, but that bar looks awesome.

Joe Desmond – Rum XP member and mixologist. Lives in New York, acts as a judge to various festivals, collects rums and is reputed to have one of the most extensive collections in New York.

José León Boutellier – You’d think Bacardi ran out of entrants, but no, here’s another one from the House of the Bat. Sometime after Facundo Bacardí Massó came to Cuba in 1830, he inherited (through his wife) an estate of Clara Astie; this included a house, and a tenant, the French Cuban Mr. Boutellier, who ran a small distillery there which produced cognac and sweets. After hammering out the rental agreement, the two joined forces and Facundo was granted use of the pot still, creating the Bacardi, Boutellier y Co. in 1862. By 1874 Don Facundo and his sons bought out Boutellier’s stake as he declined in health. But it is clear that without Boutellier’s pot still and the happenstance of him being in that house, Bacardi would not be the same company. Small beginnings, big endings.

Jennings Stockton Cox – American mining engineer who is said to have invented the Daiquiri, perhaps because at the time when he made it, he had been working in Cuba, close to the village of Daiquiri. Supposedly running out of gin and not trusting local rum served neat, he added lime juice and sugar. Some say that Cox just popularized an already existent drink, but whatever the case, he’s now associated with it.

Rafael Aroyo – Author of an ur-text of rum-making in the 1940s – “The Production of Heavy Rum.” It is used by many home brewers as a veritable bible on how to make home-hooch. I wish I’d had it when I was a young man working in the bush. The white lightning we made could have used some expertise, and I could have saved some IQ points.

José Abel y Otero – founder of Sloppy Joe’s in Cuba just after the First World War. Immigrated from Spain to Cuba in 1904, then moved to New Orleans in 1907, then again to Miami, and returned to Cuba in 1918, where he worked in a bar called The Greasy Spoon before founding his own bodega called Sloppy Joe’s. In 1933 another bar with the same name opened in Florida (and Hemmingway was a patron…the guy sure did get around) which specifically referenced the original from Old Havana.

Alvarez & Camp – the two families who united to form Matusalem.

José Arechabala y Aldama – Founder of the Havana Club rum and the company that made it, before being expropriated following the 1959 Cuban Revolution

Robert Stein – inventor of a columnar still subsequently refined by Aeneas Coffey (see above). Stein’s 1828 still was itself inspired by the continuous whiskey still patented by Sir Anthony Perrier in 1822

George Washington – Possibly one reason the first president of the USA is on this list is because he liked rum – so much so that he demanded a barrel or two to be on hand for his inauguration. On the other hand he did operate a distillery himself on Mount Vernon, and it was the largest in the country at that time. Alas, it mostly produced whiskey.

Owen Tulloch – Joy Spence’s mentor in Appleton, he was the master Blender until 1997. I hope he and Mr. Robinson are having a good gaff somewhere up there, smoking a good Cuban, playing dominos on a plywood table, and arguing about the relative merits of El Dorado versus Appleton.

Alfred Lamb – creator of Lamb’s Navy Rum and London Dock rum in the 1800s. Another pretender to the crown, if either Lemon Hart of James Man are to be believed.

John Barrett – Managing Director of Bristol Spirits. They may not be THE name in craft spirits, but that doesn’t stop ’em from trying to grab the brass ring. Their excellent series of classic and limited edition rums are characterized by bright, eye-catching labels, great enclosures, and a quality not to be sneezed at. Their PM 1980 remains one of my favourites.

Charles Tobias – Founder of Pusser’s in the BVI in 1979 after he bought the rights and blending information for Navy Rum from the Admiralty, with the first sales beginning in 1980. They have trademarked the “Painkiller” cocktail to be made with only their rum. Mr. Tobias has always ensured that a portion of the sale of every bottle goes to charity.

Cadenhead’s – Possibly Scotland’s oldest independent bottler, founded in 1842 and a family owned and managed concern until 1972, when they were taken over by J.A.Mitchell, proprietors of Springbank distillery. While they are more staid whisky boys than rabid rummies, their unadulterated, unfiltered rums are excellent and date back to the successor of founder W.Cadenhead (Mr. Robert Duthie) who took over in 1904, and added Demerara rums to the stable. Because of bad business decisions made in the years following the death of Mr. Duthie in 1931, Christie’s auctioned off the entire stock of whisky and rum in 1972 (the same year the fixed assets and goodwill went to Springbank)…so any Cadenhead rums from this era may well be priceless.

Tony Hart – Brit rum enthusiast, rum expert, trainer of barmen, lecturer, taster, who has worked for Tia Maria and Lemon Hart, and all over the globe. Conducts tastings, workshops and seminars and spreads the gospel

4finespirits – online German rumshop which also has a pretty interesting blog. Not sure what it’s doing in this list since it’s a recently established site (2015). Somebody must sure like them. Recently started a video blog on YouTube.

Andres Brugal – full name Andrés Brugal Montaner, a Spaniard who migrated from Catalonia in Spain to Cuba (where he learned the fundamentals of how to make rum), and thence to the Dominican Republic, where he established Brugal and produced his first dark rum in 1888. The first warehouses for ageing there were built in 1920, and the company exists, making good rums, to this day. However, it is no longer owned by the Brugals, but the Edrington Group out of Scotland, who bought a majority shareholding in 2008.

Bryan Davis – This man may change the rum world, or be conning it. Opinions are fiercely divided on what the man behind Lost Spirits Distillery has accomplished. Short form is that by using chemistry and molecular analysis to build a molecular reactor, he can supposedly churn out rum which shows the profile of a 20 year old spirit…in six days. I’ve heard his rums are pretty good, but never tried any. A good article on Wired is here.

Got Rum? – online rum magazine run by Luis and Margaret Ayala

Samuel Morewood – British etymologist who wrote an essay in 1824 on the origins of the word “rum” in An essay on the Inventions and Customs of both Ancients and Moderns in the use of Inebriating Liquors. It’s actually quite a fascinating read, even now.

Cédric Brément – French maker of flavoured rums, and owner of the company Les Rhums de Ced.

Frank Ward – Chairman of the West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers Association and Managing Director of Mount Gay in Barbados. This gentleman has his work cut out for him. First to try to save the smaller Caribbean producers from the massive subsidies the big guns get, and secondly to impose some order on the crazy patchwork of rum via trying to get agreement on standards. Part of the solution is to create the Authentic Caribbean Rum Marque. An interview with Got Rum? magazine is here.

Enrique Shueg – Brother in law of Emilio, Facundo and Jose Bacardi, the three sons of the founder. Born the same year as the company was founded (1862), he steered the company almost single-handedly into the modern area, and was the key link between the small family firm and the global behemoth it eventually became. He played a leading role in the company for fifty years, expanding the reach of Bacardi to jet set visitors, tourists and even gangsters, and making Cuba the home of rum before moving operations to Puerto Rico.

Dean Martin – drinker of rum, singer and film star and member of the 1950s era Rat Pack.

Reviewers – there are so very few reviewers out there for rum (versus the hundreds who blog about whiskies). Those that enter the field have their work cut out for them, not least because of the paucity of selections which they can review on the budget they have. They serve a useful purpose in that they raise rum awareness as much as any brand ambassador or festival/competition organizer and provide useful (if free) advertising for many small outfits who might otherwise never be heard about outside their state, province, canton or country.

And there you have it. All the reference points people have made on the list. This took me the better part of a day to hammer together under the influence of both coffee and some homemade hooch, so please forgive any errors I’ve made in the spelling. It was fun to do, and I hope you who have had the stomach to read this much and have reached this point (drunk or sober), walk away with an enriched body of knowledge on rum’s past and present Big Guns.

Oh, and one other influence on rums…

All we drinkers: it is we as drinkers, writers and exponents, who make the industry. Cheers to us all!

Nine Leaves

 1 Response »
Jan 202015
 

Photograph Copyright © Niko Neefs

 

There’s a aspect of Japanese culture which appeals to me a lot – the concept of kaizen, or slow, patient, incremental improvement of a thing or a task, by constant repetition and miniscule refinement, that over time can lead to spectacular results and quality. Consider Toyota’s manufacturing processes as an example. Or the master chef Jiro Ono, who has been making sushi for decades, constantly making his work simpler, more elegant…and better, much better, Michelin-3-star better. Or the filmmaker Ozu, who always seemed to make exactly the same film, until his repeated, specific observations on Japanese life became universal generalities (look no further than 1955’s “Tokyo Story” if you are interested).

Given the length of time Japanese stay in their professions, or the years lavished by them on their artistic endeavours before even pretending to any kind of expertise, it may be too early to include Nine Leaves distillery in this august company – yet there’s something in the stated long term philosophy of its founder and sole employee (for now), who began the operation in 2013, which reminded me of this idea and how it is a part of Japanese thinking. And I enjoyed all three of the micro-distillery’s products when I tried them in October 2014, and wanted to know more about the company.

There have, of course, been other Japanese rum producers and brands: Ryoma (Kikusui), Yokosuka, Ogasawara, Midorinishima, Cor-cor come to mind, and most of these are in the south, or in Okinawa, where climate favours the production of sugar. However, none of them have ever made a real splash on the world scene. And all are relatively modest affairs, much like Nine Leaves is, though one could argue Nine Leaves markets itself somewhat better.

Nine Leaves Distillery is located in the Shiga Prefecture on Honshu island, at the south end along the river Seta. It sits at the foot of a privately owned, nameless mountain, which is mined for anorthite (feldspar), the glaze used in high-end porcelain. When the bottom fell out of the market as a result of cheaper glaze from China, the owners started bottling the water from a spring under the ground level, which was unusually soft, and it was the prescence of this water which convinced the man behind Nine Leaves to ground his new operation there.

Photograph Copyright © Niko Neefs

Much like all startups, the short history of this outfit cannot be separated from that of its owner: Mr. Yoshiharu Takeuchi. As I remarked in my review of the French Oak Cask Angel’s Half, nothing in his background or that of his family would suggest that this was a passion of his. The family business was one of those small sub-contracting firms that manufactured precision car parts for the big car companies, and located in Nagoya; it was started by Mr. Takeuchi’s grandfather. Mr. Takeuchi himself was dissatisfied with the life, and casting around for some creative endeavour of his own — something he could make and control from start to finish, which showcased a long tradition of Japanese craftsmanship – and was drawn to the possibilities of distilling whiskey. However he was soon diverted more towards rum, because unlike the highly regulated Scottish drink, rum was (and remains) remarkably free of any kind of global standards…which he saw as an opportunity to put his own stamp on the process and end-product. And also unlike the craft makers — like Cadenhead, G&M, Velier, Rum Nation, etc — Nine Leaves never intended to rebottle from pre-purchased casks sourced in the West Indies or wherever, but is a one stop shop from almost-beginning to end.

There was not a whole lot of rum distilling expertise in Japan, yet Mr. Takeuchi did manage to spend a whole three days (!!) soaking up the advice of another small distillery owner, Mr. Ichiro Akuto of Chichibu (he was the grandson of the founder of the now-defunct Hanyu Distillery), which had been operating since 2008, and used small copper stills from Forsythe’s to make a range of whiskies. On the advice of Mr. Akuto, he ordered a wash and spirit still from Forsythe’s as well, and when they arrived in Japan, assembled them himself; he dispensed with wooden washbacks and went with stainless steel instead, figuring that if it was good enough for Glenfarclas, it was good enough for him. Having found his water supply, established his site close by, and having assembled his equipment (personally), he next sourced his brown sugar from Tarama-jima (a small island in the Okinawa archipelago) …one can only wonder what would have happened had he found the perfect water next to a sugar plantation in the south of Japan. Most likely he would have gotten into cane cultivation, and made his own sugar as well.

Photograph Copyright © Niko Neefs

All preparations complete, Mr. Takeuchi was ready to commence operations in 2013, two years after having made his initial decision, without hiring any staff…and without quitting his day job.

The source of the fermented wash is neither molasses nor cane juice, but brown sugar (muscavado) and water, which may explain something of the rums’ interesting profiles, seeming to be somewhat of a hybrid of both agricoles and molasses-based rum, without exactly being either. Mr. Takeuchi has noted on his website that this was a deliberate choice: “[I aimed]… to discard the variable of bitterness or off-flavor from sugar cane juice and molasses, and to enhance the clear, refined sweetness and… [lingering tastes] that I had in mind.” After the first distillation of the wash – fermentation takes about four days — Mr. Takeuchi’s process for making rum relies heavily on the second distillation, where careful monitoring of the spirit quality and the cut phases to reduce the amount of undesirable feints (he sometimes tastes every few minutes). Usually in the three standard cuts (‘heads’, ‘hearts’ and ‘tails’), it’s the ‘heart’ you want to keep – the skill comes in knowing when to start taking out the distillate from that middle phase, before which you throw away the ‘head’ and after which you dispense with the ‘tails’ (unless in the latter case you’re after some interesting effects, or wish to use them both to redistill later). It would appear that Mr. Takeuchi has a flair for making his cuts just right, which he rather drily attributes to an appreciation for his wife and other’s home cooking in developing his sense of taste and smell. However, one can also assume that something more personal is at work here, as evinced in a remark Mr. Takeuchi made, oddly similar to one Fabio Rossi of Rum Nation also expounded: it comes down to “trusting your nose and your instinct…we all know what’s good and what isn’t.”

Photograph Copyright © Niko Neefs

Because bottle shape in Japan is highly standardized – depending on the bottle one can tell immediately whether it contains local tipples like nihonshu (sake) or shochu – Nine Leaves sourced its glassware from France, and bottles the non-chill-filtered by hand, as well as manually affixing the labels (sometimes the family chips in to help). At the time when the company began in 2013, it issued an unaged ‘Clear’ rum, bottled at 50% (it’s the same as a ‘white’ – the name was chosen to reference the glaze mined in the mountain). In that same year Mr. Takeuchi, thinking beyond making just a localized white lightning, sourced 225 liter virgin oak casks, of American and French oak, one of each. His intention was to set aside perhaps 60% of his production, create two gold variations aged for perhaps six months, and move on to ageing 20% more into a dark set of rums aged for more than two years (the remainder will be white rum). And there are already plans to use ex-sherry, ex-bourbon and ex-wine barrels (this last from California) as well, so certainly we can expect to see the range of Nine Leaves expand in the years to come.

The question is how much, and how soon. Nine Leaves lacks warehousing space, though plans are afoot to build some. In speaking to Mr. Takeuchi last year he told me he’ll keep his output minimal for a while, enough to retain his distilling license from the Japanese Government, and to allow him to progressively age his rums, tweak with the taste profiles, perhaps even build some inventory. A regular release of the six-month-aged gold rums would occur – another batch was set to be bottled around the same time we met (of course, since he was talking to me, he couldn’t be bottling anything…). A lot would depend on the reaction of the rum drinkers in the world to the products he had already issued in early 2014 – the French and American oak Gold “Angel’s Half” rums and the “Clear”, and he was certainly doing his best to attend the various rum and whisky expos in order to build awareness and find potential distributors.

Photo (c) Nine Leaves

Mr. Takeuchi also sees that the process of building a brand name is one that will take years, if not decades, and intends to make this a family operation spanning the generations. It’s not something to be hurried, and since ageing of spirits is intimately involved, having a timeline of years is perhaps not so unusual.

You kind of have to admire that kind of persistence and determination in a man who not too long ago was making machine parts for cars.

***

So here’s an opinion (as opposed to the more straightforward facts above).

I thought his rums were atypical. They were clearly young, but quite well made for all that. There was a certain clarity and cleanliness to the taste reminiscent of the agricoles, yet some of the slightly darker notes coming from the residual molasses notes in the brown sugar. I considered the French Oak rum slightly better than the American oak version, and the Clear reminded me somewhat of Rum Nation’s 57% White Pot Still rum…not quite as good, but not too far behind it either (they are both recognizably pot still products, for example). My opinion aside, it bears mention that the “Clear” won an award for “Innovation de l’année” in Paris in 2014 for the silver category and the American Oak won “Best Newcomer” at the 2014 Berlin Rumfest. The difference in Nine Leaves’ products to this point seems to be that western/Caribbean rums, aside from being aged longer, have many things going on all at the same time, often in a kind of zen harmony, while Nine Leaves’s philosophy is more to accentuate individual notes, a sort of central core dominant, supported by lighter, subtler tastes that don’t detract or distract from the central note of character. Of course as these rums age for longer periods, I fully expect to see the profile evolve: but there was no denying that at the time I was quite impressed with the first batch (and said so, in my review of the French Oak, even if I had my qualifiers).

Also…

The Nine Leaves logo (also source of the company title) is a modified samurai crest (“kamon”) of the Takeuchi family…nine bamboo leaves. It is no coincidence that “Take” in Japanese means ‘bamboo’. As a student of history, I’d love to know how that all came about. In an interview with AboutDrinks website in 2014, Mr. Takeuchi noted his family was once involved in the timber/wood industry. If this was bamboo, the question is answered.

And…

I am indebted to Stefan van Eycken of nonjatta.com, whose five part series on Nine Leaves I drew on for many of the points regarding distillation technique. Hat tip and acknowledgement to Niko Neefs for permission to use some of his photographs.

Arigato to Mr. Takeuchi himself, who patiently endured my pestering questions for half an hour straight even as my wife was trying to drag me away. And then responded to more questions by email.

Below is a list of some products issued by Nine Leaves. It’s incomplete because of the swift six month cycle of releases, but I’ll try to keep it up to date.

 

 

Sources:

Rum Nation

 4 Responses »
Nov 122014
 

ima_rum nation logo

Anybody who has read my work will know something of my admiration for Rum Nation, a company that came to my attention back in 2011 and which I’ve followed ever since. As Yesu Persaud springs to mind when thinking of DDL, or Luca Gargano is indelibly associated with Velier, Fabio Rossi, the CEO of Rossi & Rossi, is the man whose name is synonymous with Rum Nation.

The Venetian family of Rossi has been in the business of spirits and general trading for a long time, even though Rum Nation has only been in existence since 1999. Its sister company Wilson & Morgan predated RN’s formation by nine years (it’s into whisky — I like to joke that Fabio only realized his mistake after many years and formed Rum Nation to apologize) and the family involvement in spirits dates back to the pre-war years, when the Rossis dealt in wine. The original patriarch of the family, Guiseppe Rossi, was a wine and oil merchant with a small and thriving business, and after the turmoil of the second world war, his son Mario took over the company and expanded it. Rising success and profits in the 1960s persuaded Mario Rossi to begin importing whisky from Scotland, mostly blends – at the time whisky didn’t have quite the same exclusive cachet it later acquired; as time passed and craft and premium blends took center stage, such higher quality spirits were imported directly from the source distilleries in Scotland.

Fabio Rossi, 2014 German Rum Fest

In the 1980s this portion of the business became so successful that the Rossis – both of Mario’s sons, Walter and Fabio, had by then joined the company – introduced craft spirits to their portfolio. These were single malt whiskies, independently bottled by the company, and, as time went on, stocks that made up these bottling were selected by Fabio Rossi. Fabio had trained as an oenologist in Conegliano, and, like many successful independents, married both education and experience into a personal philosophy summarized by the statement: “Trust your palate and your instinct.” The creation of the “King of Whiskies” brand encapsulated that idea – Fabio went personally to Scotland in 1990 to source his selections, went into partnership with W. M. Cadenhead and created the line of “Barrel Selection” whiskies with a new company, which he called Wilson & Morgan.

Wilson & Morgan exists to this day, and rode the wave of independent craft bottling of aged single malts. But as it happened, in his search for whiskies, Fabio often noticed that next to ageing barrels of such single malts, were other barrels: rums, old ones, brought over from the Caribbean to mature more gradually. Often they were blended into the more popular navy rums of the day, rather than being issued in their own right. He conceded that at the time he had no clue about rums, really…he tasted them and moved on. Yet he never forgot; and after the explosion of El Dorado on the scene in 1992, he saw the opportunities. After all, if the expertise garnered in the whisky business should be readily transferrable, then distilleries previously making average grog could produce aged and off-the-scale quality rums with some judicious ageing and blending. Too, the world in the 1990s was already moving towards exclusivity in spirits like vodkas, tequilas, whiskies…why not rum?

He discussed the idea with another Italian, a business colleague of the family, Silvano Samaroli (a whisky broker and bottler since 1968, and who also made and makes craft rums), and that gentleman gave him the necessary background education in the various rum styles, as well as pointers regarding marketing and business strategy. (As an aside, Mr. Samaroli may be one of the first to take craft bottling of rum seriously, but that’s another essay entirely.)

Armed with this information, and being unwilling to blend the recognized W&M brand with an upstart drink which could crash and burn (okay, that’s the storyteller in me reaching a bit), Fabio formed Rum Nation in 1999; many of the characteristics of W&M were copied wholesale for this new company – the rigourous sourcing of stock from obscure and not-so-obscure distilleries, partial maturation in Europe, the finishing in other casks (port, rum or marsala casks, for example). As before in his Scottish adventure, Fabio Rossi went island hopping around the Caribbean, sourcing what he could, buying what he liked, sometimes leaving the barrels in situ, sometimes shipping them to Europe. The ethos of both companies, unsurprisingly, remains very much the same: source barrels from favoured distilleries based on personal investigation, age and blend further as appropriate, and issue. Expand the line into other niche markets and other distilleries and countries and styles, as the business grows.D7K_9376

Unlike the recognized and recognizable distillery-profiles of Scotland – after all, which dedicated Maltster can possibly confuse an Ardbeg with a Glenfarclas? – rum profiles are more generally associated with islands, or even whole regions, not often specific distilleries (though this does, of course, occur). This led to the decision to produce and market rums by such regions – Demerara (for Guyana), Jamaica, Barbados, and so on – though many really rarefied snooters can tell, or at least hazard a guess, whether the Enmore, Longpond or Rockley still produced a given rum for these.

The first rums RN issued were Demeraras and Jamaicans, in 1999 and 2000. I’d dearly like to know what kind of impact they had on the marketplace, but one thing is certain – in 2014 they can only be classed as collector’s items, and are as rare as hen’s teeth. I imagine that the reception of these rums was extremely positive, because Rum Nation expanded the line to include rums from several other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, in the subsequent years: expressions hailing from Martinique, Trinidad, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala were added in short order. Fabio may have eschewed distillery-specific marketing, but he certainly did his best to raise the rum-profile of whole countries, over and beyond national brands previously and solely identified with them (and which were distillery- or estate-specific), like DDL, Mount Gay, Flor de Cana, or Longpond, to name a few. I don’t doubt that he used stock from those places, he just refused to identify them as such, and made his own specific blend from what he found there.

Two rum marques that deserve mention are the Millonario and the Reimonenq line, because both resulted in rums (and in the former case, a company) that were ostensibly apart from Rum Nation, yet beefed up its profile.

D3S_3597
The success of Zacapa in Italy in 2001 made Fabio resolve to find something that could take it on, if not actually exceed it: in Peru in 2004, he discovered a small distillery (he never named it, and while I think I know which one it is, I’m still not 100% certain) that made a delicate and sweet rum in the solera style. With skills garnered from Lorena Vasquez of Zacapa – she, like Mr. Samaroli years before, provided Fabio with the core information on setting up a solera system, how to mix barrels (different sizes and woods) in order to blend distillates with different aromatic profiles and ages to obtain a balanced final vatting. The resulting rum was a phenomenally smooth product – the Millonario Solera 15 and the XO, the latter of which is, in my opinion, a smidgen better (but also more pricey). I leave it to you to decide whether they are either or both better than the new (or old) Zacapa that is a perennial favourite among rum drinkers of the world. The XO in particular has received rave reviews from across the board (mine among them), is a constant favourite of my wife, and the 15 may be one of the best value-for-money rums of its kind ever made. However, it must also be noted that these rums in particular – as well as several others in the lineup – have received scathing criticism over the years for the practice of “dosing”, or the adding of caramel / sugar / additives. Some writers and connoisseurs refuse to drink them at all and discussions on the online fora both condemn the practice as well as take Rum Nation to task for not providing better disclosure.

Assigning the Reimonenq rums to Rum Nation is somewhat problematical. In this instance the Reimoinenq name of these agricoles maker was left intact, and the rums Fabio found on Guadeloupe distillery (still family owned) were bottled under that name as a special edition exclusive to Rossi&Rossi – so are they Rossi products or not? I’d suggest they are, because he selected them and was instrumental in their issue. When asked about why he chose this path to market the rums – i.e., separating them from the Rum Nation line, which already had a very good Martinique rum or two and a Guadeloupe – he remarked that the extreme character of the rum might have come as shock to the palates of his core constituency, who were more used to the softer rums RN had issued to that point. (I have never tasted any, so cannot comment on the reputed tastes of wood, licorice, coffee, oil and Tobermory and Ledaig single malts which comprise the profile). You might note that this kind of caution has been eroded somewhat with the unaged, feisty and pungent Jamaican pot-still full-proof white rum which Rum Nation issued in 2014. Clearly Rum Nation now has enough hard-won street-cred not to worry overmuch about the potential of one poorly received edition among many.

D3S_3949-001

 

The technique of acquiring the knowledge and expertise of others in the field did not stop there. A particular point of pride for Fabio was the creation of the two Panama rums (the 18 and 21 year old, released in 2004 and 2010 respectively), which came about after a meeting with Don Francisco Fernández, a Cuban Master Blender well known for his work with the Panamonte line, possibly the Abuelo rums (my supposition – I’m not sure, but the tastes hint at the possibility) and (I sigh to say it) Ron de Jeremy. Don “Pancho” was instrumental in creating the blend of “mezcla” for the luxury 21 year old, about which I was extremely enthused, and which I think is a remarkable rum for its price (Can$100 or so).

The philosophy of the company remains stable, and firmly married to that of Wilson & Morgan. Rum will continue to have a primary ageing cycle in the tropics, and secondary ageing and finishing in Europe. To quote Fabio – “The first [ageing] is more intense, it helps the distillate to lose the ‘young’ notes and to take up sweetness and fruitiness (also thanks to a large percentage of ex-bourbon barrels). The problem is that after some years under the Caribbean sun, alcohol levels fall too low and the wood starts to dominate. Here the second phase comes to our aid, letting the subtler aromas come out slowly and allowing us better control of the flavour profile by means of different barrel sizes, smaller or larger according to how much we want to have oak influence on the rum or simply let it rest and soften up, leaving time to work its magic on the distillate rounding it up with the elegance that only a long wait can give. In this second phase we can play freely, like tailors, to shape our bottlings according to our taste, and it’s as important as the choice of distillate coming out of the stills.” Depending on the desired finish, barrels from the Spanish bodegas are often used – sherry, Pedro Ximenez, or even barrels which once held Spanish brandy.

The years 2014 to 2016 saw Rum Nation moving into progressively different areas, all of them interesting. The bottle shape was redesigned (the stamps remain on the labels); the Jamaican pot still rum is to be released in progressively older variants, a Panama 18 solera was issued in 2015 and the old Demeraras and Jamaicas got another iteration. And at last, in 2016, Rum Nation went all in and began to sell their Rare Rums, initially made up of three older Demeraras, and additional Jamaican and Reunion rums issued in 2017. The rationale here was to appeal to the “most jaded” connoisseurs who demanded not only unfiltered, unadulterated country-specific rums, but still-specific, cask-strength products (the Supreme Lord and aged Demeraras were never consistently from the same estates/stills).

I imagine it will be just a question of time before many other countries’ rums get this treatment as well. As far as Fabio is concerned, the search for new products to expand his catalogue is neverending. Like all companies that have found a growing niche market with dedicated consumers wanting to extend their horizons beyond the obvious, you can tell RN is positioning itself to expand even further into rum bottlings as esoteric and eccentric as my questions. So while it was never stated outright, I imagine we’ll be seeing aged and stronger variations of the old favourites, some more agricoles, and maybe rums from even further afield…India, maybe, or even Fiji, Thailand, or Australia. It’ll be a fun experience, watching it all unfold in the years to come, and one thing is for sure, we’ll be enjoying them. I know I will.

***

Some opinions and notes of my own, over and beyond the facts as reported above:

I wanted to remark on the difference between the maturation philosophies of the two companies, Rum Nation and Velier, or, as I like to joke, Athens and Sparta. Velier, as I noted in their company profile, does not muck about. Cask strength, bam, always fully matured in tropics, so here, take that – there’s something awe inspiring about their commitment to brute simplicity, austerity and quality. And then there’s Rum Nation – softer and perhaps more elegant stylists, who age their barrels in situ and then in Europe. They issue rums at middling strengths (generally 40-45%), almost nothing in power like the massive blows of a full-proof (this began to change in 2014, and in 2016 really took off with the Small Batch collection). There’s a soft kind of serene voluptuousness about their rums, yet also a real heft and thickness that transcends mere taste and encompasses texture, mouthfeel, how it fades – it’s really lovely stuff, and even the rums Fabio tosses off as “entry-level spirits” were, to me, a cut above the ordinary. One company adheres to a minimalist, strong-is-better philosophy, and I can just imagine them throwing out the weak or the unfit; the other takes some time, babies its offspring a bit, takes them on journeys, changes their barrels and seems a bit more playful. Both take their s**t really seriously. And both deserve enormous respect because of it, different as their products might be.

***

A list of Rums RN have produced is below (updated as best as I can), linked to any review I might have done. Also included is the Millonarios and Reimonenqs, since these are brands Fabio manages as part of his overall spirits business. Please note that because of the same rum being issued with the same name in multiple years, it is almost inevitable that I would have missed something. As always, drop me a line for what I’ve overlooked.

Note that Barrel-Aged-Mind, that great German rum resource, also has a similar page on RN.

  • Barbados 12 YO 1995-2008 43% (2008 release)
  • Barbados 10 YO 2001-2011, 40%
  • Barbados 8 YO 2002 -2010 43%
  • Barbados 8 YO 2000-2008 43%
  • Barbados 10 YO 2004-2014 43%
  • Barbados 10 YO 2005-2015 40%
  • Barbados 12 YO Anniversary (2014 release) 40% (RL Seale)
  • Barbados Anniversary Decanter 2016 40%
  • Demerara 27 YO 1973-2000 45%
  • Demerara 26 YO 1974-2000 45%
  • Demerara 24 YO 1975-1999 45%
  • Demerara 25 YO 1975-2000 45%
  • Demerara 31 YO 1975-2007 43%
  • Demerara 21 YO 1980-2001 45%
  • Demerara 18 YO 1981-2000 45%
  • Demerara 18 YO 1982-2000 45%
  • Demerara 23 YO 1985-2008 43%
  • Demerara 16 YO 1989-2005 45% (private client)
  • Demerara 23 YO 1989-2012 45%
  • Demerara 25 YO 1990-2015 45% (sherrywood finish)
  • Demerara 15 YO 1989-2004 43%
  • Demerara “1989” 12 YO (2001) 45%
  • Demerara “1990” 12 YO (2002) 45%
  • Demerara “1991” 12 YO (2003) 45%
  • Demerara 15 YO 1990-2005 43%
  • Demerara 23 YO 1990-2014 45%
  • Demerara 25 YO 1990-2015 45%
  • Demerara 15 YO 1991-2006 43%
  • Demerara 12 YO 1992-2004 43%
  • Demerara 15 YO 1992-2007 43%
  • Demerara 12 YO 1993-2005 43%
  • Demerara 12 YO 1994-2006 43%
  • Demerara Solera No. 14 Realease 2008 40%
  • Demerara Solera No. 14 Release 2010 40%
  • Demerara Solera No. 14 Release 2012 40%
  • Demerara Solera No. 14 Release 2017 40%
  • Guadeloupe Blanc (Unaged) Release 2015 50%
  • Guadeloupe Blanc (Unaged) Release 2016 50%
  • Guadeloupe Vieux Release 2016 40%
  • Guatemala 23 YO 1982-2005 Release 2005 40%
  • Guatemala 23 YO 1984-2007 Release 2007 40%
  • Guatemala Gran Reserva 2018 40%
  • Panama 10 YO Release 2016 40%
  • Panama 18 YO (3 pre-2004 releases, years unknown, per RN/FR)
  • Panama 18 YO Release 2004 40%
  • Panama 18 YO Release 2005 40%
  • Panama 18 YO Release 2007 40%
  • Panama 18 YO Release 1991-2009 40%
  • Panama 18 YO Release 1994-2012 40%
  • Panama 18 YO Release 2010 40%
  • Panama 18 YO Release 2014 40%
  • Panama 18 YO Release 1997-2015 40%
  • Panama 18 Year Solera 2015 40%
  • Panama 18 Year Solera 2016 40%
  • Panama 21 YO Release 1989-2010 40%
  • Panama 21 YO Release 1993-2014 40%
  • Panama 21 YO Release 1995-2015 40%
  • Peruano 8 YO 2008-2016 46.5% *for Denmark #1)
  • Peruano 8 YO 2006-2014 42%
  • Peruano 8 YO 2007-2015 42%
  • Peruano 8 YO 2000-2008 42%
  • Peruano 8 YO 1999-2007 42%
  • Peruano 8 YO 1998-2006 42%
  • Rhum Reimonenq Rhum Vieux 5 YO 2009-2014 40%
  • Rhum Reimonenq Rhum Vieux 10 YO 2004-2014 40%
  • Rhum Reimonenq Rhum Vieux 2003 40%
  • Rhum Reimonenq Rhum Vieux 1998 40%
  • Rhum Reimonenq 5 YO 2006-2011 40%
  • Rhum Reimonenq 9 YO 1999-2008 40%
  • Trinidad 5 YO 2012-2017 (ABV TBA)
  • Trinidad Caroni 18 YO 1998-2016 55%
  • Trinidad Caroni 16 YO 1999-2015 55%
  • Trinidad Caroni 16 YO 1998-2014 (Batch 1) 55%
  • Trinidad Caroni 16 YO 1998-2014 55%
  • Venezuela 10 YO 1992-2003 43%

The Rare Collection

  • Rare Collection Enmore 2002-2016 14 YO 56.8%
  • Rare Collection Enmore 2002-2016 14 YO 58.8%
  • Rare Collection Enmore 2002-2017 15 YO 58.3%
  • Rare Collection Enmore 1997-2016 19 YO 58.7% Sherry Finish
  • Rare Collection Enmore 1997-2017 20 YO 56.4% Whisky Cask Finish
  • Rare Collection Hampden 1992-2016 24 YO 61.6%
  • Rare Collection Hampden 1998-2016 18 YO 66.3%
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2001-2016 15 YO 52.8%
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2004-2019 15 YO 62.8%
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2006-2016 10 YO 54.2%
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2005-2017 12 YO 59.5%
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2006-2018 12 YO 59.7% Grand Arome
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2008-2018 12 YO 57.4% Sherry Finish
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2007-2017 10 YO 59.3% Sherry Finish
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2006-2019 11 YO 57.6% Traditionnel
  • Rare Collection Savanna 2007-2019 12 YO 62.7% Grand Arome
  • Rare Collection Worthy Park 2006-2017 11 YO 57.0%
  • Rare Collection Worthy Park 2006-2018 12 YO 58.0%
  • Rare Collection Caroni 1997-2017 20 YO 57.8% (Sherry finish)
  • Rare Collection Caroni 2009-2017 8 YO
  • Rare Collection Caroni 1997-2018 21 YO 59.2% “Islay Cask”
  • Rare Collection Caroni 1998-2019 21 YO 57.9%

Sources

 

BBC TV’s Sherlock

 No Responses »
Apr 012013
 

One of the pleasures of watching BBC TVs 2010/2012 show “Sherlock” is the sly, tongue in cheek references it makes to the canon of Sherlock Holmes; another is the sheer length of each episode…ninety minutes per; and a third is the precise casting of the eponymous lead and the Doctor. About the only thing I grumble about in this well-written, well-acted TV series is the fact that the Brits don’t seem to understand that a season should not be three episodes a year – even Life on Mars and its follow up had more. And for someone as iconic as the Baker Street ‘tec, with multitudinous adventures both direct or merely alluded-to…well, there’s no shortage of material here.

But move beyond these issues, watch the show, and tell me that if you have even the slightest interest in Holmesia, that this is not a brilliant recapturing of the spirit of the famous consulting detective and his faithful sidekick. Updated for the modern world, complete with smartphones and texting instead of hand-delivered notes, or London cabs instead of hansoms, delivering sly winks at the iconography at every turn, it’s a treat for anyone who has worked his way through the literary Conan-Doyle canon. I adore this kind of clever construction.

The series opener is a good example of what I mean, down to the title itself: “A Study in Pink.” Watson, recently discharged from the army after being wounded in Afghanistan (the show nudges the ribs in having Watson limp, yet stating his wound was actually in the shoulder – the wound alternated in Doyle’s stories too) is looking for digs, and is introduced to Holmes by an old friend. It’s in the first meeting and the subsequent conversations that you see the impact that a modern sensibility has on the show: Holmes’s rapid fire delivery, the decision to show his deductions as little texts on screen, his lanky uncoordinated movements and his barely concealed disdain for the lesser mortals who are not quite as sharp as he is. Benedict Cumberbatch, now better known in 2013 as Khan from the second Star Trek reboot (good acting and a workmanlike effort, but one soon to be forgotten…Montalban has a lock on the character, sorry), to my mind made his bones here as an actor to watch even after his work on “Atonement” – observe the body language, the well-modulated voice, the expressions: they’re all perfect for the persona that, over hundreds of films and shows, has taken residence in our collective imaginations.

The writers seem to have a lot of fun upending expectations. The choice of taking the pill from the “A Study in Scarlet” novella, one deadly one harmless, is somewhat reversed here, having a different motivation; the word “Rache” opined by Lestrade in the book as being “Rachel” and dismissed by Holmes as being German for revenge, is here actually referring to a Rachel. Holmes hates the deerstalker hat made iconic in Sidney Paget’s Strand illustrations. Even Moriarty’s plot to discredit Holmes by pretending innocence and that it’s all Holmes’s imagination to create an uber-villain, has echoes of Nicolas Meyer’s “Seven Percent Solution” novel and film (the phrase is referenced several times). That’s what I mean about the show being clever: it’s got clues and references cheerfully scattered all around it. The blog Watson keeps has playful takes on Holmes’s canonical adventures….I particularly liked “The Speckled Blonde” and “The Six Thatchers”, and the reference to the five pips and to Spock (who may be a relative, if you believe Star Trek VI)

The relative quality of various episodes has a hard time keeping up. I thought “A Scandal in Belgravia” was well put together – the cat and mouse game Holmes and Irene Adler play with modern technology, as well as their overt and covert relationship were wonderful to watch (although the last five minutes is not actually necessary). In others: Mycroft is well cast, with delicious dialogue of his own; the ongoing effort of Watson to enter into a romantic relationship is one of the show’s low key humourous delights, as is the running gag of Watson trying to tell everyone he and Holmes are not gay. And I was intrigued with – how could I not mention the arch-enemy? – the take on Moriarty, who is seen as an evil genius, yes, but less of the old school, genteel, Brit steel, and more of an American warped-genius psycho mentality. Maybe it was necessary to take the good doctor in a different direction, but perhaps for a character as well known as this one, veering off course might not have been the best way to go (he is neither referred to, nor really gives the impression, of being the “Napoleon of crime”). However, that’s minor…you kind of have to enjoy the spectacle of clever people facing off against each other in a battle of wits each hoping to be a step ahead of the other.

I’ve long believed that Spock, Sheldon Cooper and House MD (the last probably more clearly than any) are incarnations of the concept of the driven genius so well exemplified by Holmes. All shy away from, if not actually despise, interpersonal relationships; all are genius-level professionals lacking external interests outside their area of focus; they are always the smartest people in the room, running rings around the merely average intellects surrounding them. I could mention Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Whimsey, Adam Dalgleish, or even the many other smart detectives shown on American television (CSI springs to mind), but it’s the coldness and haughty, sneering demeanours covering a certain well-concealed, rarely-revealed (and even more rarely acknowledged) humanity that sets the detective, the Vulcan, the physicist and the doctor apart.

At end, though it’s all about Holmes’s genius and Watson’s everyman persona, and their relationship. I’ll be the first to accept that the season two closer handles their friendship awkwardly at best (in contrast, the conclusion of A Study in Pink was written just perfectly). I enjoyed Martin Freeman’s Watson expressing his ongoing exasperation with Holmes’s superiority complex (I was reminded of the way Leonard and the boys always groan “Nooo” whenever Penny asks Sheldon a question they know will result in a long winded and confusing answer), and attention should be paid to the interaction between Holmes and the shy pathologist Molly, to say nothing of his relationship with Mrs. Hudson (“Unthinkable. If she leaves, England will fall”) and even Lestrade, who grudgingly respects him. Speaking for myself, the various conversations between and with the doctor and the detective remain the heart and soul of the show, as they were in the books and all the other films. The cases are just convenient backdrop and set decoration for that.

These matters showcase something I’ve always felt: a show’s writing is the key, and it must be about more than just explosions, chases, murders and everything tied up in a bow at the end. To take up residence in our imaginations, a film or a show must have heart, must involve us in the characters, their inner lives and turmoils, make us feel for them, care for them, cheer for them. Sherlock may be uneven at times, but it’s overall quality of writing, direction, dialogue, music, production design and characterization is a cut above the ordinary, and I look forward to see what the Brits come up with for the world’s foremost consulting detective in the next three episodes. After all, as even Conan-Doyle found out, you just can’t keep the good detective dead forever.

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