Clément “Canne Bleu” Rhum Blanc Agricole Millésime 2014 – Review

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Jan 262021
 

In an ever more competitive market – and that includes French island agricoles – every chance is used to create a niche that can be exploited with first-mover advantages.  Some of the agricole makers, I’ve been told, chafe under the strict limitations of the AOC which they privately complain limits their innovation, but I chose to doubt this: not only  there some amazing rhums coming out the French West Indies within the appellation, but they are completely free to move outside it (as Saint James did with their pot still white) – they just can’t put that “AOC” stamp of conformance on their bottle, and making one rum outside the system does not invalidate all the others they can and do make within it.

This particular rhum illustrates the point nicely. It’s an AOC rhum made from a very specific variety of cane coloured gray-purple (don’t ask me how that got translated to ‘blue’) which is apparently due to an abundance of wax on the stem. It’s been used by Habitation Clément since 1977 and supposedly has great aromatics and is richer than usual in sugar, and is completely AOC-approved.

Clément has been releasing the canne bleue varietal rhums in various annual editions since about 2000. Its signature bottle has gone through several iterations and the ice blue design has become, while not precisely iconic, at least recognizable – you see it and you know it’s a Clément rhum of that kind you’re getting.  Curiously, for all that fancy look, the rum retails for relative peanuts – €40 or less.  Maybe because it’s not aged, or the makers feared it wouldn’t sell at a higher price point. Maybe they’re still not completely sold on the whole unaged white rhum thing, even if the clairins are doing great business, and unaged blancs have gotten a respect of late (especially in the bar and cocktail circuit), which they never enjoyed before

What other types of cane Habitation Clément uses is unknown to me.  They have focused on this one type to build a small sub-brand around and it’s hard to fault them for the choice, because starting just with the nose, it’s a lovely white rum, clocking in at a robust 50% ABV. What I particularly liked about it is its freshness and clarity: it reminds me a lot of of Neisson’s 2004 Single Cask (which costs several times as much), just a little lighter. Salty wax notes meld nicely with brine and tart Turkish olives to start.  Then the crisp peppiness of green apples and yoghurt, sugar water, soursop and vinegar-soaked cucumber with a wiri-wiri pepper chopped into it. The mix of salt and sour and sweet and hot is really not bad.

It’s sharp on the initial tasting – that levels down quickly.  It remains spicy-warm from there on in, and is mostly redolent of fresh, sweet and watery fruit: so, pears, ripe green apples, white guavas.  There are notes of papaya, florals, loads of swank, avocados, some salt, all infused with lemon grass, ginger and white pepper.  The clarity and crispness of the nose is tempered somewhat as the tasting goes on, allowing softer and less aggressive flavours to emerge, though they do stay on the edges and add background rather than hogging the whole stage. The finish is delicate and precise; short, which is somewhat surprising, yet flavourful – slight lemon notes, apricots, cinnamon and a touch of unsweetened yoghurt.

So, what to make of this econo-budget white rhum? Well, I think it’s really quite good. The Neisson I refer to above was carefully aged, more exclusive, cost more…and yet scored the same — though it was for different aspects of its profile, and admittedly its purpose for being is also not the same as this one. I like this unaged blanc because of its sparkling vivacity, its perkiness, its rough and uncompromising nature which masks an unsuspected complexity and quality. There are just so many interesting tastes here, jostling around what is ostensibly a starter product (based on price if nothing else) — this thing can spruce up a mixed drink with no problem, a ti-punch for starters, and maybe a daiquiri for kicks. 

I don’t know what aspects of its profile derive from that bleue cane specifically because so far in my sojourn through The Land of Blanc I’ve experienced so many fantastic rhums and each has its own peculiar distinctiveness. All I can say is that the low pricing here suggests a rhum that lives and dies at the bottom of the scale…but you know, it really shouldn’t be seen that way.  It’s far too good for that.

(#796)(85/100)

Other Notes

  • Production is limited to between 10,000 and 20,000 bottles a year, depending on the harvest. Not precisely a limited edition but for sure something unique to each year.
  • Thanks to Etienne Sortais, who provided me with the sample, insisting I try the thing. He was certainly right about that.

Ron Malecon Reserva Imperial 25 YO Rum – Review

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Jan 182021
 

We’ve been here before. We’ve tried a rum with this name, researched its background, been baffled by its opaqueness, made our displeasure known, then yawned and shook our heads and moved on. And still the issues that that one raised, remain. The Malecon Reserva Imperial 25 year old suffers from many of the same defects of its 1979 cousin, most of which have to do with disclosure and some of which have to do with its nature. It astounds me that in this day and age we still have to put up with this kind of crap.

The little we know from wikirum (this is slightly more than four years ago when I wrote about the Malecon 1979) is that the Don Jose distillery in Panama is the producer – this is the same Varela Hermanos gents who make the popular and well known Abuelo brand. Malecon’s actual ownership as a company or a brand is as hard to track down as before – all the website contact information points to distributors, not owners and their own press information section stops in 2016 and they apparently never participated in any events past 2017, which, coincidentally, is when I first tried their stuff. Their FB page (there’s only one, for the German market) is a bit more active but mostly represents marketing blah, not one of engagement with customers and fans. I read somewhere that the owner is an Italian who likes Cuban style rum and worked with Don Pancho to come up with this range of rums, which is as good or as useless as any other story without corroboration.  (Honestly, with Panama rums these days, I hardly care any more – it’s gotten that bad).

Anyway, profile-wise, there is really very little to shout about with respect to how it tastes.  I can save you some trouble – unadventurous, simple, easy are the adjectives which come to mind.  The nose is quiet and soft: chocolate milk, anise, caramel, some creaminess of ice cream, vanilla, nougat.  There is very little fruitiness to balance this off with some tart flavours – a whiff of citrus peel maybe, a grape or two, not much more and maybe a touch of black tea.

The palate is similarly soft and similarly straightforward. It’s got more chocolate milk and and perhaps a touch of coffee grounds. A smidgen, barely a smidgen of oak and citrus, a sly taste of tangerines; it’s not very sweet (which is a plus) and sports some brine and Turkish olives and a touch of slight bitterness, which I’m going be generous and say is an oak influence that saves it from being just blah.  Finish is okay I guess. Gone too quickly of course, no surprise at 40% ABV and leaving at best the sense of some black tea with too much condensed milk in it, that doesn’t entirely hide the fact that it’s too bitter.

Many will like a rum like this. Tipplers of soft favourites like the Abuelo 7, RN Panama 18 YO, El Dorado 12 YO, the Santa Teresa 1796 or the Diplomatico line would have no issues here at all. Overall, though, from my perspective, aside from bigger Panamanian brands with some actual muscle behind their products (think Abuelo or Origenes), there’s little coming out of the country that either surprises or interests me and this is just another one of them. They’re straightforward rums of little pizzazz (this may be by intent), and while the Malecon 25 is a decent Panamanian, there’s little to distinguish it from a distillate a decade younger.

But, for a rum for which a premium is set because of the supposed ageing of 25 years, that’s not a thing people should be saying about it, because it creates negative expectations for both the brand and the whole country and makes real rum lovers look elsewhere. Let’s hope that in the years to come, this small nation’s rums and their industrial-sized producers can up the ante, make better and more transparent juice and so address the changing tastes of the global audiences better.  Then they could reclaim some of their reputation, which rums and companies like this one have treated with such cavalier disdain, and so carelessly.

(#795)(77/100)

Other notes

  • Lest you think I’m being unfair, others were similarly dismissive: WhiskyFun’s Serge said “isn’t much happening here” though he liked it better than other Malecons, and scored it 78; while his partner in rum, Angus (another rum lover who just doesn’t know he is), didn’t think it was good from a technical side either, and rated it 64. Brian over on /r/reddit gave it a harshly middling score of 53/100, which is just about how I rank it as well (on my own scale). Alex over at Master Quill, the source of the sample I was trying, rated it 82 and also commented on the resemblance to an Abuelo. The best info relating to the brand is probably RumShopBoy’s review of the range from mid 2020, and I recommend it highly (his points score for the 25YO was 55/100).
  • There are two enclosures, one with a wooden box, one with a cardboard one.  The rum is the same in both cases as far as I am aware. I was sent a sample from the wooden-box bottle, which was released first, back in 2016 or so before they switched to cheaper cardboard a few years later.
  • Treat the age statement with caution, as it is unverifiable. Any company this hard to track down doesn’t make provision of the benefit of the doubt an easy task.

Oliver & Oliver Ron Presidente 23 Solera – Review

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Jan 142021
 

Ahh, that magical number of 23, so beloved of rum drinking lovers of sweet, so despised by those who only go for the “pure”.  Is there any pair of digits more guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of those who want to make an example of Rum Gone Wrong? Surely, after the decades of crap Zacapa kept and keeps getting, no promoter or brand owner worth their salt would suggest using it on a label for their own product?

Alas, such is not the case.  Although existing in the shadow of its much-more-famous Guatemalan cousin, Ron Presidente is supposedly made the same way, via a solera method of blending about which not enough is disclosed, so I don’t really buy into (too often what is claimed as a solera is just a complex blend). Oliver & Oliver, a blending company operating in the Dominican Republic, was revived in 1994 by the grandson of the original founder Oliver Juanillo who had fled Cuba in 1959.  It is a company whose webpage you have to peruse with some care: it’s very slick and glossy, but it’s not until you really think about it that you realize they never actually mention a distillery, a specific type of still, source of distillate, or any kind of production technique (the words “traditional pot-still method” are useful only to illustrate the need for a word like cumberworld).

That’s probably because O&O isn’t an outfit formed around a distillery of its own (in spite of the header on Flaviar’s mini bio that implies they are), but is a second-party producer – they take rum from elsewhere and do additional work on it.  Where is “elsewhere?”  It is never mentioned though it’s most likely one of the three B’s (Bermudez, Barcelo, Brugal) who have more well known and legitimate operations on the island, plus perhaps further afield as the back label implies..

Well fine, they can do that and you can read my opinion on the matter below, but for the moment, does it stand up to other rums, or even compare to the well-loved and much-derided Zacapa?

I’d suggest not. It is, in a word, simple.  It has an opening nose of caramel, toffee and nougat, hinting at molasses origins and oak ageing.  Some raisins and prunes and easy fruit that aren’t tart or overly sweet.  Plus some molasses, ripe papaya, and strewed apples and maple syrup. And that syrup really gets big in a hurry, blotting out everything in its path, so you get fruits, sweet, and little depth of any kind, just a sulky kind of heaviness that I recall from El Dorado’s 25 Year Old Rums…and all this from a 40% rum.

It gets no better when tasted.  It’s very darkly sweet, liqueur-like, giving up flavours of prunes and stewed apples (again); dates; peaches in syrup, yes, more syrup, vanilla and a touch of cocoa.  Honey, Cointreau, and both cloying and wispy at the same time, with a last gasp of caramel and toffee.  The finish is thankfully short, sweet, thin, faint, nothing new except maybe some creme brulee. It’s a rum that, in spite of its big number and heroic Jose Marti visage screams neither quality or complexity.  Mostly it yawns “boring!” 

Overall, the sense of being tamped down, of being smothered, is evident here, and I know that both Master Quill (in 2016) and Serge Valentin (in 2014) felt it had been sweetened (I agree). Oliver & Oliver makes much of the 200+ awards its rums have gotten over the years, but the real takeaway from the list is how few there are from more recent times when more exacting, if unofficial, standards were adopted by the judges who adjudicate such matters. 

It’s hard to be neutral about rums like this. Years ago, Dave Russell advised me not to be such a hardass on rums which I might perhaps not care for, but which are popular and well loved and enjoyed by those for whom it is meant, especially those in its country of origin — for the most part, I do try to adhere to his advice.  But at some point I have to simply dig in my heels and say to consumers that this is what I think, what I feel, this is my opinion on the rums you might like. And whatever others with differing tastes from mine might think or enjoy (and all power to them – it’s their money, their palate, their choice), this rum really isn’t for me.

(#794)(74/100)

Other Notes

  • The rum is named “Presidente”. Which Presidente is hard to say since the picture on the label is of Jose Marti, a leading 19th century Cuban man of letters and a national hero of that country.  Maybe it’s a word to denote excellence or something, the top of the heap. Ummm….okay.
  • On the back label it says it comes from a blend of Caribbean and Central American rums (but not which or in what proportions or what ages these were). Not very helpful.
  • Alex Van der Veer, thanks for the sample….

Opinion

I’ve remarked on the business of trust for rum-making companies before, and that a lot of the compact between consumer and creator comes from the honest, reasonably complete provision of information…not its lack.

I make no moral judgements on Oliver & Oliver’s production strategy, and I don’t deny them the right to indulge in the commercial practice of outsourcing the distillate — I simply do not understand why it’s so difficult to disclose more about the sources, and what O&O do with the rums afterwards.  What harm is there in this? In fact, I think it does such non-primary brand-makers a solid positive, because it shows they are doing their best to be open about what they are making, and how…and this raises trust. As I have written before (in the reviews of the Malecon 1979, Mombacho 1989, Don Papa Rare Cask and Dictador Best of 1977) when relevant info is left out as a deliberate marketing practice and conscious management choice, it casts doubt on everything else the company makes, to the point where nothing is believed.

Here we get no info on the source distillate (which is suggested to be cane juice, in some references, but of course is nowhere confirmed).  Nothing on the companies providing the distillate. Nothing on the stills that made it (the “pot stills” business can be disregarded). We don’t even get the faux age-statement fig-leag “6-23” of Zacapa.  We do get the word solera though, but by now, who would even believe that, or give a rodent’s derriere? The less that is given, the more people’s feeling of being duped comes into play and I really want to know who in O&O believes that such obfuscations and consequences redound to their brand’s benefit. Whoever it is should wake up and realize that that might have been okay ten years ago, but it sure isn’t now, and do us all a solid by resigning immediately thereafter.

Moon Import Guadeloupe 1998 12 Year Old Rhum – Review

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Jan 112021
 

The rum starts slowly.  I don’t get much at the inception. Bananas, ripe; pineapples, oversweet; papayas, dark cherries, nice….and a touch of beetroot, odd. Not my thing, this rather thin series of tastes — it develops too lethargically, is too dim, lacks punch. I wait ten minutes more to make sure I’m not overreacting…perhaps there’s more? Well, yes and no. These aromas fade somewhat, to be replaced by something sprightly and sparkling – fanta, sprite, red grapefruit, lemon zest – but overall the integration is poor, and doesn’t meld well and remains too lazily easygoing, like some kind of clever class wiseass who couldn’t be bothered.

Palate is good, I like that, though perhaps a few extra points of strength would have been in order (my opinion – your own mileage will vary).  Still, it’s tasty – vanilla, green peas, pears, cucumbers, watermelon, sapodilla and kiwi fruits, grapes.  Low key, almost delicate, but well assembled, tasting nice and clean, a sipper’s delight for those who like reasonably complex faux-agricoles that are light and crisp and not dour, heavy brontosaurii of flavour that batten the glottis flat. The finish wraps things up with a flourish, and if short, it at least displays a lightly sweet and fruity melange that describes the overall profile well. 

The distillery of origin of this Moon Imports’ 1998 Guadeloupe rum (from their “Moon Collection”) is something of a mystery, since the “GMP” in the title does not fit any descriptor with which I am familiar. It could possibly be Gardel, which Renegade quoted as a source with their 11 YO 1998 rum, also released at 46%…but Gardel supposedly shut down in 1992, and afterwards Damoiseau / Bellevue was said to have used the name for some limited 1998 releases.  But it remains unclear and unproven, and so for the moment we have to leave that as an unresolved issue, which I’ll update when better info comes in.

(Photo taken from eBay; note that many Bellevue releases from Moon Import have almost exactly the same design)

Slightly more is known about Moon Import, the Italian company from Genoa that released it. Its origins dating back to 1980 when an entrepreneur named Pepi Mongiardino founded the company: he had worked for Pernod, Ballantine’s and Milton Duff in the 1970s, tasting and testing high end single malts. When that business took a downturn, he took some opportune advice from Sylvano Samaroli on how to set up a business of his own, and used a reference book to check which whiskies were not yet imported to Italy.  He cold-called those, leading to his landing the contract to import Bruichladdich. Initial focus was (unsurprisingly) whiskies — however it soon branched out from there into many other spirits, including rum, which came on the scene around 1990, and it followed the tried and true path of the independent bottler, sourcing barrels from brokers (like Scheer) and ageing them in Scotland. Label design was often done by Pepi himself, popularizing the concept of consistent individual designs for “ranges” that others subsequently latched on to, and from the beginning he eschewed 40% ABV in favour of something higher, though he avoided the full proof cask strength rum-strength model Velier later made widespread.

That all out of the way, the core statistics of this rum are that it was column distilled in 1998 (but not in or by Gardel); probably from molasses as the word agricole is nowhere mentioned and Guadeloupe does use that source material in the off-season; aged in Scotland for twelve years and released in 2010, at a comfortable strength of 46% ABV. Like Samaroli and Mark Reynier at the old Renegade outfit, Mongiardino feels this strength preserves the suppleness of the spirit and the development of a middling age profile, while balancing it off against excessive fierceness when drunk.

By the standards of its time and his philosophy, I’d say he was spot on.  That does not, however, make it a complete success in this time, or acceptable for all current palates, which seem to prefer something more aggressive, stronger, something more distinct, in order to garner huge accolades and higher scores. It’s a rum that opens slowly, easily — even lazily — and gives the impression of being “nothing in particular” at the inception.  It develops well, but never really coalesces into a complete package where everything works.  That makes it a rum I can enjoy sipping (up to a point), and is a good mid-range indie I just can’t endorse completely.

(#793)(84/100)

Other notes

  • Thanks again to Nicolai Wachmann for the sample. The guy always has a few tucked in his bag for me to try when we get together at some rumfest or other. Remind me to bug him for a picture of the bottle.
  • 360 bottle outturn

Clarke’s Court No. 37 Limited Edition 8YO Grenada Rum – Review

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Jan 072021
 

The Masters of Malt blurb for the Grenada-distilled Clarke’s Court No. 37 rum contains two sentences that make one both smile and ask more questions. A “blended Caribbean rum” which is “the thirteenth limited release rum from Clarke’s Court.” And as if trying to top that, they go on to say “The rum was designed to be supplied to exclusive social events” and both just reek of some marketing intern making ad copy in his sleep, evidently unable to come up with anything more interesting about this equally lackadaisical rum.

Why not a “Grenadian” rum, one wonders. And, if this is the 13th edition, why is it called No. 37? Is it related to the possible year of establishment of Grenada Distillers Ltd? Unlikely, because the 1998 book  Grenada: Island of Conflict by George Brizan notes that as being 1936, though admittedly the Clarke’s own website notes the factory as becoming operational in 1937. An anniversary of independence? But that was 1974 so 37 years later would be 2011. Dave Russell of the Rum Gallery probably nailed it when he said it was issued to commemorate independence, and the 300th year of establishment of St. George’s (not strictly right – it was started much earlier – but the star-shaped Fort Royale, later St George’s, was indeed completed in 1710).

Where are the other 12 editions, then? Or No. 1 through No. 36? No records exist. Further research reveals that it’s a blend, released in 2010 and was aged for 8 years in oak barrels, and with current editions of the No. 37 blend also being released at 12 years of age. The Ultimate Rum Guide remarks it was married and then rebarreled with more fruit flavour infused (oh oh…) but this is backed up nowhere else except in hydrometer tests, which also point to additives. Lastly, while the Fat Rum Pirate noted his assumption as being a pot and column still blend, His High Wonkiness says there’s only a two-column still at Grenada Distillers, with which they occasionally make some heavier rum from plates lower down in the column and mix that into the lighter stuff from plates higher up.

Picture copyright Charlene Gooding, from Pinterest

It’s a good thing I did this research after I did the tasting, because all these questions and backstories that filled in the sadly lacking label and website info, came later, and didn’t influence my initial opinion. Alas, that opinion wasn’t all that terrific either. Which is odd in itself, because the experience started out quite solid – the nose, for example, was warm, a little spicy, and smelled initially of molasses bubble gum and soda pop.  Quite sweet smelling, and got deeper than the above might imply or the strength would suggest. Nice tropical fruit basket too – guavas (the red ones), bananas, mangoes, watermelon, gherkins, plus toblerone white, almonds.  Nicely creamy.  Some soft salty notes, like dates and figs.  Creme brulee and caramel.  Irish coffee. So…nice.

It’s on the palate that it sinks, and some of the falsity shines through.  Weak and wispy to a fault. Bubble gum and fanta.  Light citrus, pears, more mangoes and guavas, but oddly muted, as if they aren’t sure they’re supposed to be here (this is usually a good indicator of tampering). White chocolate, crushed almonds, a hint of nutmeg, nuts, vanilla, some salt caramel ice cream. There’s even some light fresh (and I swear I’m not making this up) laundry detergent kinda taste. Overall, just unimpressive, with a finish that has to knock twice to make sure it’s heard, let alone noticed, and gives little beyond some miscellaneous fruits and a bit of tart yoghurt to let us know it was ever even there.

It’s a peculiarity of the rum that it said it was limited, but never actually how limited – the label has a bottle number, but not a “…out of xxx bottles” statement. So it’s hard to say what’s special or limited about the whole thing, especially as it continues to be made to this day and the year of distillation of the bottle one has is not mentioned.  Moreover I can almost guarantee that few reading this know anything about it unless they went on a cruise down to the island themselves, or — like me, Chip, Dave and Ed — date back from those days a decade or more back, when the standards for both rums and labels were very much less exacting than they are now and we accepted what we got with gratitude at getting anything at all.

However that was then, and those same easy standards and low strength fail the rum in this day and age.  It’s nice enough for the unadventurous and indifferent but in no way is it as premium as it makes out it is.  It’s weak, it’s not well assembled, the years it slept actually seem like less, and it’s been added to. Therefore, to me, it’s an average rum of no distinction or special individuality — and so I think I’ll close this already-overlong review by just giving it an average sort of score. 

(#792)(77/100)

Dzama 6 Year Old Madagascar Rum – Review

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Jan 042021
 

The Dzama 6 year old rum from the island of Madagascar sits between the modest 3 and 5 year old rums, rubs shoulders with an 8 YO, and looks up to the more exclusive 10 YO and 15 YO expressions; the company has been busy expanding the range since I first tried their 3 year old back in 2014. Unsurprisingly, the local market share of the company’s spirits is a massive 60% or so – they make a bit of everything alcoholic and are a very diversified drinks conglomerate – their prime market remains Madagascar itself with exports to Europe, some states of the USA and Canada. That said, it has never quite caught on with the rum drinking crowd the way the rhums of the French Caribbean islands, or Mauritius or Reunion have. 

That might result from the appearance of vanilla and other spices in the flavour profile, though the makers deny any additives on any but the clearly marked spiced variations of the line (like the Vanilla). Company founding legends state that the original genesis of the cane was in the small northwestern island of Nosy-be where supposedly the oils and perfumes of the various botanicals to be found there (vanilla, cloves, pepper are often cited) leach from their roots into the soil and are intermixed with the cane plants’ own root systems, into their stems, and thence to the ultimate distillate. I’m no chemist or botanist, but one could just as easily wonder why similar processes aren’t observed on the spice island (Grenada) for example.

That spiced profile was evident on the 3 year old and I marked it down for that (as did the Fat Rum Pirate when he looked at it some time later), thinking it too dominant.  It’s much less evident here, and in fact, this was almost a completely different rum.  It smelled of rubber, varnish and acetones, and was quite light at 45% ABV.  It had aromas of rotten bananas, fleshy fruits, and going-off apricots, mangoes and pears. That admittedly sounds rather off-putting (I assure you it really isn’t), and what quite a few people hate about such rums, we reviewers like to call it “pleasant” and “character-filled.” In fairness, I remember thinking it reminded me of a low rent Jamaican, but lacking their complete unconcern for the funk you were getting – it was, perhaps, more well-behaved.

The palate was thick, rich and sweet, even in comparison the the 3YO which showed no modesty with such aspects itself but while stronger, had also been paradoxically easier.  Here we were regaled with bananas, cherries in syrup, brown sugar, and a sort of smorgasbord of fruitiness – some tart, some just soft and mushy – and creaminess of greek yogurt sprinkled with cinnamon and cloves. Disappointingly, the finish did nothing much except lock the door and walk off, throwing a few notes of cloves, sugar, cherries, peaches and syrup behind.  Not a stellar finish after the intriguing beginning.

Whether Lucien Fohine — who founded the Vidzar, the owning company in 1980 — was right about the way local plants’ aromas came into the final distillate, or whether they catered to local palates by goosing the juice a tad, the fact is that the rum is a bit too sweet and a bit too overdone, like a nouveaux riche showing off new furs and new bling. It’s not precisely overkill, more like a loud drunk regaling a joint with loud and boring sports stories you’re not interested in – it’s distracting, even off-putting and makes the enjoyment less.

That said, it’s not precisely a bad rum either. It’s a bit like a Bacardi Gold mixing it up with a Diplo Res Ex, or some other such tasty workhorse that can be used for a number of different purposes, even a neat sip – the relatively low strength and the aforementioned tastes help there.  But for someone who knows his rums it’s a bit of a let down, and while it’s certainly pleasant as it is — cocktail gurus and professional mixologists could probably find good things to do with it —  I think I’d rather spring for the upscale aged versions that have more character and less of those distracting flavours.

(#791)(82/100)

Other Notes

Habitation Velier Forsyth’s Pot Still Unaged White Rum (WPE) (2017) – Review

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Dec 302020
 

Hampden gets so many kudos these days from its relationship with Velier —  the slick marketing, the yellow boxes, the Endemic Bird series, the great tastes, the sheer range of them all — that to some extent it seems like Worthy Park is the poor red haired stepchild of the glint in the milkman’s eye, running behind dem Big Boy picking up footprints. Yet Worthy Park is no stranger to really good rums of its own, also pot still made, and clearly distinguishable to one who loves the New Jamaicans. They are not just any Jamaicans…they’re Worthy Park, dammit. They have no special relationship with anyone, and don’t really want (or need) one.

For a long time, until around 2005, Worthy Park was either closed or distilling rum for bulk export, but in that year they restarted distilling on their double retort pot still and in 2013 Luca Gargano, the boss of Velier, came on a tour of Jamaica and took note. By 2016 when he released the first series of the Habitation Velier line (using 2015 distillates) he was able to convince WP to provide him with three rums, and in 2017 he got three more.  This one was a special edition of sorts from that second set, using an extended fermentation period – three months! – to develop a higher ester count than usual (597.3 g/hLpa, the label boasts). It was issued as an unaged 57% white, and let me tell you, it takes its place proudly among the pantheon of such rums with no apology whatsoever.

I make that statement with no expectation of a refutation. The rum doesn’t just leap out of the bottle to amaze and astonish, it detonates, as if the Good Lord hisself just gave vent to a biblical flatus. You inhale rotting fruit, rubber tyres and banana skins, a pile of warm sweet garbage left to decompose in the topical sun after being half burnt and then extinguished by a short rain. It mixes up the smell of sweet dark overripe cherries with the peculiar aroma of the ink in a fountain pen.  It’s musty, it’s mucky, it’s thick with sweet Indian spices, possesses a clear burn that shouldn’t be pleasant but is, and it may still, after all this time, be one of the most original rums you’ve tried this side of next week. When you catch your breath after a long sniff, that’s the sort of feeling you’re left with.

Oh and it’s clear that WP and their master blender aren’t satisfied with just having a certifiable aroma that would make a DOK (and the Caner) weep, but are intent on amping up the juice to “12”.  The rum is hot-snot and steel-solid, with the salty and oily notes of a pot still hooch going full blast. There’s the taste of wax, turpentine, salt, gherkins, sweet thick soya sauce, and if this doesn’t stretch your imagination too far, petrol and burnt rubber mixed with the sugar water. Enough?  “No, mon,” you can hear them say as they tweak it some more, “Dis ting still too small.” And it is, because when you wait, you also get brine, sweet red olives, paprika, pineapple, ripe mangoes, soursop, all sweetness and salt and fruits, leading to a near explosive conclusion that leaves the taste buds gasping.  Bags of fruit and salt and spices are left on the nose, the tongue, the memory and with its strength and clear, glittering power, it would be no exaggeration to remark that this is a rum which dark alleyways are afraid to have walk down it.

The rum displays all the attributes that made the estate’s name after 2016 when they started supplying their rums to others and began bottling their own. It’s a rum that’s astonishingly stuffed with tastes from all over the map, not always in harmony but in a sort of cheerful screaming chaos that shouldn’t work…except that it does. More sensory impressions are expended here than in any rum of recent memory (and I remember the TECA) and all this in an unaged rum. It’s simply amazing.

If you want to know why I’m so enthusiastic, well, it’s because I think it really is that good. But also, in a time of timid mediocrity where too many rum makers (like those Panamanians I was riffing about last week) are afraid to take a chance, I like ambitious rum makers who go for broke, who litter rum blogs, rumfest floors and traumatized palates with the detritus of their failures, who leave their outlines in the walls they run into (and through) at top speed.  I like their ambition, their guts, their utter lack of fear, the complete surrender to curiosity and the willingness to go down any damned experimentative rabbit hole they please. I don’t score this in the nineties, but God, I do admire it – give me a rum that bites off more than it can chew, any time, over milquetoast low-strength yawn-through that won’t even try gumming it.

(#790)(86/100)

Other notes

  • Outturn unknown.  
  • The Habitation Velier WP 2017 “151” edition was also a WPE and from this same batch (the ester counts are the same). 
  • In the marque “WPE” the WP is self explanatory, and the “E” stands for “Ester”

SMWS R9.2 Panama 2004 12 YO Rum (“Paddington Bear’s First Sip”) – Review

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Dec 282020
 

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) has always had a peculiar turn when it comes to labels and tasting notes. The original bottlings didn’t always have permission to use the distillery names on the bottlings — at the time, blends were big, and distilleries did not always want their names to be associated with some off-the-wall, left-field bottle from a strange outfit, when this might shed a poor light on what they were more famed for…the consistency of their blends. This led the SMWS to the use of numerical identifiers for their outturns, and a whimsically titled name that had no relation to reality, really (almost every reviewer makes some reference to how they ignore those names, or don’t understand them).

What that does, though, is force the buyer / drinker / reviewer to actually pay attention to the product and discard preconceived notions at the door. Most will deny this to the heavens, but I firmly believe that few can divorce their expectations of a rum based on the label it sports, from the experience they expect to have, and then actually have. Which makes sense: if you see “Port Mourant” on a label, you expect to drink one, not some weird agricole or a Spanish style ron and your mind will bend that way. SMWS takes away this crutch – not completely, because by now everyone knows what the numbers mean – but enough so that the rums stands or falls upon your relatively clean experience.

So we walk into this rum, knowing only it’s from Panama. We don’t know if its from PILSA / Las Cabras or Don Jose / Varela Hermanos, the two main distilleries (my research suggests the latter); it has a 62% strength and 12 years of ageing in refill ex-bourbon barrels that resulted in 243 bottles. And that’s it.

But what these bare-bones notes don’t tell you is how impressive the dram actually is.  You’d think an industrial column still mass-produced swill can’t aspire to something greater than its origins, yet here it tries hard, it really does. The initial column-still blandness it starts out with is rescued by good barrel activity and some serious cask strength. Notes of coconut, caramel, some boot polish, licorice waft up from the glass, some blancmange, bon bons, chocolate mints and there’s even the hint of an old, well-loved and much-abused leather sofa.  After resting, it opens up to some nice truffles and chocolate notes, vanilla and florals, pineapples, oranges.  Pretty good for a region that has much fallen from favour in the last years as the New Jamaicans, Bajans and other distilling regions forge ahead.

In spite of the high ABV, which lends a fair amount of initial sharpness and heat to the tongue until it burns away and settles down, it’s actually not that fierce. It becomes almost delicate, and there’s a nice vein of fruity sweetness running through, which enhances the flavours of apples, cider, green grapes, citrus, coconut, vanilla, and candied oranges. There’s also some of that polish and acetone remaining, neatly dampened by caramel and brown sugar, all balancing off well against each other. It retains that delicacy to the finish line and stays well behaved: a touch sweet throughout, with caramel (a bit much), vanilla, fruits, grapes, raisins, citrus, blancmange…not bad at all.

I’ve been indifferent to Panamanian rums of late.  My initial enjoyment of their rums from the first years of this site’s reviews — of the Rum Nation 18 and 21 year old rums, the Abuelos (especially the Centuria) and the Panamonte XXV, none of which I would now score as high as I did back then — have given way to a more critical and rather impatient judgement as I see them treading no new ground, not issuing anything particularly interesting and staying with the same old song. These days I don’t buy many and the way Las Cabras has become a distiller-for-hire for small time brands who don’t themselves produce anything ground-shaking or innovative has done little to change that opinion.

Yet somehow the SMWS seems to have bucked the trend of milquetoast anonymous blends produced by the tankerload by equally anonymous brands and third parties. This 12 year old rum strikes me as a midpoint between the soft voluptuous sweetness of the Abuelo Centuria and the rather sterner and more focused AD Rattray, and is really a fine rum for anyone to try. Unless the great Panamanian distilleries up their game and go in different directions it’s unlikely they will every recover my unbridled affection from the early years – but this one gives me hope that the potential for good rums remains.  Even if it’s only in the occasional single barrel, ferreted out by some enterprising indie in Europe. We can hope, I guess.

(#789)(86/100)

Other Notes

  • Serge Valentin of WhiskyFun didn’t dislike it, but wasn’t entirely blown away either and awarded it 78 points. Simon, over at TheRumShopBoy was more enthusiastic, to the tune of 88.
  • As usual, the name is a challenge.  Paddington is a bear beloved of British childrens’ books dating back from the 1950s, but his origin was clearly stated to be Peru, not Panama (though neither, as far as I know, have bears of any kind). So how the SMWS got from that to this is anyone’s guess…perhaps it’s his love of marmalade sandwiches, as Simon slyly pointed out.

Ron 1914 “Interoceánico” 15 Year Old Panama Rum – Review

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Dec 232020
 

Here’s my personally imaginative take on how the (fictitious) Board of Blenders from Consorcio Licorero Nacional (CLN) presented their results to the good folks at Rum of Panama Corp (registered in Panama in 2016) about the rum they intended to make for them at Las Cabras in Herrera.

“We will make a true Panamanian Rum to represent the year the Canal was opened in 1914!” they say, high fiving and chest bumping themselves in congratulation at this perspicacious stroke of marketing genius.

“But CLN is originally from Venezuela, isn’t it?” comes the confused question. ”Shouldn’t you perhaps pay homage to something from there?”

“The company is now registered in Panama, in San Miguelito, so, no.” The answer is confident. “The rum will be made at a Panamanian distillery. We will make it appeal to the masses by making it a column still light rum, but also appeal to the connoisseur crowd and beef it up to a higher strength.”

Ersatz Venezuelan patriotism is forgotten. This smells like sales. “Great!  How much?”

“41.3%” they reply, with the quietly confident air of “it’s settled” that Joe Pesci showed when he told Mel Gibson that a banker’s fee of 2% was standard, in Lethal Weapon II.

Brows knit. “Shouldn’t that be stronger?”

A twitch of moustaches, a shake of heads. This heresy must be swiftly extirpated. “That might scare away the masses, and they’re the ones we want buying the rum, as they’re the ones who move cases.”

“Ah.”

“And look, we will age it, a lot!” say the blenders brightly

Heads perk up. “Oh wonderful.  We like ageing.  How long, how old?”

“15 to 22 years.”

“That’s not bad. Except, of course, we’ve only been in business for four years, so…”

“Oh no worries.  Nobody will check. There’s that one reviewing doofus in the Middle East who might, but nobody really reads his blog, so you’re safe. And, on our website, we’ll say it’s a rum aged “up to 22 years”, so that will give you no end of credibility. People love rums aged more than twenty years”

“Isn’t that called…well…lying?”

“Not at all. It’s a blend of rums, we’ll have aged rums between those years in the blend, we’ll never say how much of each, so it’s completely legit. Better than saying 15 years old, don’t you think?”

“Well…if you say so.”

Paternal confidence is displayed. “You can’t lose: the rum is light, it’s old, the age is unverifiable but completely true, it has a cool name and date as part of the title, it’s sweet, and the production is so complex nobody will figure out who really is behind it, so nobody gets blamed…” More bright smiles all around, followed by toasts, handshakes, and the go-ahead is given.

Or so the story-teller in me supposes. Because all jokes and anecdotes aside, what this is, is a rum made to order. Ron 1914 touts itself as being a 15-22 YO blended rum,“Distilled in the province of Herrera and bottled at the facilities of CLN in Panama City.” CLN was formed in 1970 by five Venezuelan businessmen and deals with manufactured alcoholic products, though nowhere I’ve searched is there a reference to a distillery of their own. In this case it’s clear their using Las Cabras, proud possessor of a multi-column industrial still that churns out mucho product on demand. 

Now, that distillery has its own brand of rum, the Cana Brava, but also makes rum for clients: therefore brands like Zafra, Nativo, Grander note themselves as being from there – in that, then, the distillery operates like Florida Distillers who makes the completely forgettable Ron Carlos series of rums I’ve written about before.

And, unfortunately, made a rum equally unlikely to be remembered, because nosing it, your first thought is likely to be the same as mine: lights on, nobody home. There’s just so little going on here, and that’s not a function of the standard strength. There is basically some faint molasses, vanilla, a few unidentifiable fruits – not overripe, not tart, just fleshy and sweet – and an odd aroma of icing sugar. And a whiff of caramel and molasses, though don’t quote me on that – you might miss it.

The taste is also completely uninspiring. It’s so soft and easy you could fall asleep in it, and again, there’s too much vanilla, ice cream, sugar water and anonymous fruit here to lend any kind of spirit or style to the experience. Yes, there’s some caramel and molasses at the back end, but what good does that do when all it represents is a sort of “good ‘nuff” standard profile we’ve had a jillion times before in our journey? And the finish is just like that, short, breathy, a touch of mint, caramel, vanilla, and again, just a snoozefest. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Ron 1914 was a low end spiced rum, and, for those of you who may be in doubt, that’s not a compliment.

The purpose of a rum like this escapes me.  No, honestly.  What’s it for?  In this day and age, why make something so soft and anonymous?  It doesn’t work well as a mixer (a Bacardi white or gold could just as easily do the job for less, if a cost-effective alcoholic jolt was all you were after) and as a sipper, well, come on, there’s way better value out there.

It’s always been a thing of mine that a good Spanish-style ron doesn’t have to enthuse the cask strength crowd with a wooden still in its DNA, or by squirting dunder and funk from every pore – because knowledgeable drinkers of its own style will like it just fine.  They’re used to standard strength and get that subtlety of tastes imparted almost solely by barrel management and smart ageing. But I submit that even they would take one taste of this thing, put down the glass, and walk away, the way I wanted to on the day I tried it in a VIP tasting. I couldn’t do that then, but you can, now. See you.

(#788)(70/100)

Ron Vacilón Anejo Gran Reserva 15 YO Cuban Rum – Review

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Dec 212020
 

The Cuban-made Vacilón brand was launched in 2016 (as a relaunch of an apparently very popular brand from the 1950s) and has been making the rounds of the various rum festivals off and on.  It’s part of the brand’s “luxury range” of 15 / 18 / 25 year old rums, which is fine, except that as usual, there’s very little to actually go on about the production details – which remains one of the more annoying things about latin rons in general, hardly unique to Cuba. 

Suffice to say, it is made by Destilería Heriberto Duquesne attached to the local sugar mill located in Remedios in the north-central coast of Cuba under the overlordship of Cuba’s government entity Tecoazúcar. Founded in 1844 and previously known as Santa Fe, this is a distillery that produces pure alcohol as well as export rum, and makes the Vigia and the Mulata rum brands — so consolidating the information we have from those (here and here) we can say with some assurance that it’s a column still light rum, aged in ex-bourbon barrels…and that barrel strategy, coupled with skilful blending by the roneros, is behind its taste profile, not any kind of terroire or pre-distillation techniques or pot still component. 

How does that all come together when it’s time for the theory to take a back seat? Judge for yourself. Personally, I found the strength to be anemic at 40%.  It allowed aromas of caramel, nuts, flowers, coffee and cocoa to come through, just not with any kind of punch or assertiveness. Some light fruits — watermelon, papaya, guava, nothing too bold — shyly tiptoed on to the stage but at the first sigh of appreciation they panicked and ran back off again.

Tasting it made it clear this is a soft, warm sipping rum to be had by itself, and savoured that way – even ice might destroy its fragile and delicate construction.  That’s both its appeal and (for me) it’s downfall – I tasted caramel, butterscotch, bon bons, a bit of hazelnut, lemon zest, cumin and dill, a touch of ripe pear and that was it. The finish…well, it trailed off like an unfinished sentence, trending towards silence without ever having drawn attention to itself.  Which is, I must concede, about what I had expected (though not what I had hoped for) and which defined the rum as a whole.

Let me be clear – the Vacilón is a perfectly “nice” rum. On the surface, based on the label, it hits all the high points. It’s from Cuba, home of a long and proud tradition of rum making stretching back centuries. It is fifteen “true” years old.  And if it’s only 40% well, cask strength isn’t the rumiverse and standard strength rums should not be looked down upon just because they lack the spirituous equivalent of Ahnold’s biceps in his prime. 

Except that that was not the way the experience unfolded. I can live with the faint, quiet, wispy proof, I just needed to focus more, and harder, to tease out the tasting notes.  But it was simply unexciting, lacking appeal, not making any kind of serious statement for its own uniqueness and quality. It could have been five years younger and not been appreciably different. Why in this day and age they didn’t at least try to jolly it up to maybe 43% or 46% remains one of those unanswered questions to which rons have yet to respond.  Maybe it’s because they sell quite enough of what they do already and see no reason to change.

That of course is their privilege – rums like this do have their fans and markets. But as long as rons’ makers only keep trotting along the same old track at the same old pace, they’re only ever going to end up getting dismissive reviews like this one, and placing themselves in the “also-ran” finishing spot. Or even further back in the listings, which is something of a shame for an otherwise decent product on which maestros roneros expend so much time and effort. I think they can do better for today’s audiences, and they should at least give it a try, instead of recreating blends that were popular the 1950s but which are no longer as much in fashion now as they were back then.

(#787)(76/100)

Hoochery Distillery Ord River Overproof 3 YO Australian Rum – Review

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Dec 172020
 

Hoochery Distillery’s name derives from, as you might imagine, the word “hooch”, a slang term for moonshine, or illegal liquor, popular during Prohibition. Some references place the word’s origin as even earlier, with the Hoochinoo Native American tribe of Alaska, who supposedly – and unusually – made their own liquor. Whatever the case, a hoochery is a now apparently trademarked word for a low-end small-scale distillery making (you guessed it) hooch, specifically in Australia, which has a long history of formalizing words from the vernacular in new and charming ways.  

The distillery itself was established in 1993 in north-western Australia’s remote Kimberly outback by Raymond “Spike” Dessert.  He had been in the area since 1972 and when in the 1990s the Ord River irrigation area permitted sugar cane to be grown, he figured that the tropical climate, sugar cane, and need to diversify suggested a distillery.  That’s the way the company legend runs, but maybe he just liked rum and couldn’t get any worth drinking there, who knows.  What’s clear is like many independent men in a frontier province, he went about it by making stuff himself and learning as he went along, an ethos his company’s website emphasizes quite strongly.

They make several spirits – whiskey, gin, liqueurs – and quite a few rum expressions (up to 15 years old) with Australian molasses, yeast, local water and a five-day fermentation period — the wash is then run through a self-made double pot still, which keeps things at a low alcohol percentage to keep as many flavours in play as possible.  There seems to be a lot of manual labour and hands-on work involved in the entire process, which may be why the annual output of the distillery remains low. This one, their overproof, is a 56.4% three year old rum, and it’s quite an unusual beast, let me tell you.

The nose begins with metallic, ashy notes right away, damp cardboard in a long-abandoned, leaky musty house.  Thankfully this peculiar aroma doesn’t hang around, but morphs into a sort of soya-salt veggie soup vibe, which in turn gets muskier and sweeter over time; it releases notes of bananas and molasses and syrup, before gradually lightening and becoming – surprisingly enough – rather crisp. White fruits emerge – unripe pears and guavas, green apples, gooseberries, grapes. What’s really surprising is the way this all transforms over a period of ten minutes or so from one nasal profile to another. It’s not usual, but it is noteworthy.

The palate is more traditional and harbours few surprises except for how different from the aromas it turns out to be. The strength is good at 56.4% ABV and starts out very spicy – in fact, this is one of those cases where it feels stronger than it is, instead of the other way around.  It’s a melange of tart fruit – strawberries, ripe mangoes, ginnip, apricots – together with brine, olives and bananas. Some molasses and vanilla and rotten oranges at the back end, as well as a slight bitterness, a tannic element, which may derive from the mahogany wood used for the filtration (either that or the barrels used for ageing were very active, or new).  The finish was pretty good, providing final touches of molasses, fleshy fruits, salt, and some citrus and tart soursop to close off the show.

The rum as a whole started off well, and the nose suggested a great new style of rum snapping into focus. But somehow it fails on the tongue: it retains a raw sharpness without ever calming down and some of that initial promise is lost; it tastes rough and uncoordinated, and not as pleasing as that nose (and the initial taste) suggested it might be. It remains, to the end, very dry and glitteringly sharp, and not in a good way.  The three years of ageing it had were not, I deem, entirely sufficient which makes me really interested in the 10 YO or 15 YO which they make, and how they managed to soften those.

It’s a measure of how much the Caribbean distilleries and their brands dominate the rum conversation that scant attention is paid to other lands which have a long rum tradition of their own. Part of it is that rums from, for example, Australia, don’t get marketed in the west very often, selling mostly in their own country and around Asia. I can’t say that this rum is a must-have, or that it should be on any Best-Of list made by every blogger under the sun – it’s really not on that level (or the one beneath that).  But I have to admit it’s interesting, it’s new, and it’s different. I haven’t had anything like it before. In a world where we’re seeing a different overpriced indie pop up every week, perhaps paying the same money for something offbeat and unusual from Down Under might just be the way to renew our sense of what a rum can be, or aspire to.

(#786)(82/100)

Other notes

  • Charcoal filtered through mahogany chips.
  • Seems to be only available in Australia for now
  • The tongue in cheek company profile says it’s the oldest legal distillery in Western Australia.  
  • Many thanks to Nicolai Wachman from Denmark, who, knowing of my desire to try more rums from Oz, spotted me this generous sample.

Coruba Blanca Extra Light White Rum (1970s)

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Dec 142020
 

Rumaniacs Review #122 | 0785

The original Basel-based trading house behind this long-surviving rum was formed in 1889 by Jules Fiechter and Peter Bataglia, who dealt with cognac and rum under the trading enterprise of (what else?) Fiechter & Bataglia.  In 1898 Bataglia moved back to France, and a new partner named Georges Schmidt bought in and the company was renamed with an equal lack of imagination to Fiechter & Schmidt and concerned itself with wines and cognac.  The first world war nearly bankrupted them, but they survived, and in the interwar years with the relaxation of border controls and tariffs, F&S sought to buy and distribute Jamaican rums (this was a time when in Central Europe rum verschnitt was quite popular – it was a neutral beet alcohol doped with high ester Jamaican rum for kick) but did not want to go through Britain, and so went directly to Jamaica to source it.

In 1929 the Rum Company Kingston was founded under the direction of Rudolf Waeckerlin-Fiechter (Jules’s brother-in-law) in order to guarantee the selection of raw materials as well as ground the entire production process of the rum in Jamaica. The actual recipe of Coruba up to that time remained secret (Appleton and Hampden were considered as prime sources); and expansion of sales continued to around Europe, the Middle East, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. In 1962, wanting to remove themselves from Jamaica and its political issues, the island portion of the brand was sold to Wray & Nephew, with the blending and bottling for Europe and other regions remaining in Basel. In 1993 Coruba was sold to the Haecky Group, and in 2012, it got passed on yet again, this time to Campari (which is also Appleton’s parent), which is where it currently remains.

What this long intro makes clear, then, is that the white rum we have here dates back from when the Swiss concern was still the maker of record, and my own (private) opinion is that it was likely a rum for airports, airlines and cheap hotel minibars – sort of a 1970s version of today’s supermarket rums. I can’t say any of the previous two rums I tried from the company – the “Dark” in 2010 and the “Cigar” in 2013 – particularly enthused me, and the company’s blended and filtered white rums pre-dating the Age are similarly too bland, for the most part, to be of anything but historical interest…even if it was, as the label remarks, “Aged in the West Indies.”

Colour – White

Strength – 40% ABV

Nose – Caramel, vanilla, acetones, marzipan, and light white fruits on the edge of spoiling.  This makes it intriguing but it’s too weak to  make any kind of serious statement, even at 40% ABV, and reminds me of a slightly beefed-up Dry Cane white, though just as uninspiring when compared against today’s more serious rums.

Palate – Lemon peel, pears, fingernail polish, very light, almost wispy.  Vanilla and cloves.  Almost all the more assertive scents like acetones and heavier fruits stay with the nose and don’t make it to the taste. Really not much more — and the dryness advertised on the label is nothing of the kind.  It’s essentially a white mixer a la Bacardi, with even less character.

Finish – Short, sweet and light, vanishing fast.  Some lemon peel, a touch of alcohol-ness and a fruit nor two, mostly watery.

Thoughts – It terms itself “extra-light, extra-dry”. The first half is true.  Still, it’s 40% and has a nice soft mouthfeel to it, and if the ephemeral nature of the profiles fails to excite, at least it’s painless, even sort of pleasant.  It clearly appealed to the palates of yesteryear, who were perfectly happy to dunk it into a mix like a Cuba Libre, which is likely the only place it ever really resided, and where it should always be left.

(72/100)

Veritas White Blended Rum (Foursquare/Hampden) – Review

 1 Response »
Dec 092020
 

In commenting on the two-country blend of the Veneragua, Dwayne Stewart, a long time correspondent of mine, asked rather tartly whether another such blend by the Compagnie could be named Jamados.  It was a funny, if apropos remark, and then my thought went in another direction, and I commented that “I think [such a] blend’s finer aspects will be lost on [most]. They could dissect the Veritas down to the ground, but not this one.”

It’s a measure of the rise of Barbados and the New Jamaicans that nobody reading that will ask what I’m talking about or what “Veritas” is. Three near-hallowed points of the rumcompass intersected to make it: Barbados’s renowned Foursquare distillery, which provided a blend of unaged Coffey still and 2 YO pot still rums for their part; and Hampden out of Jamaica chipped in with some unaged OWH pot still juice to provide some kick.  Since those two distilleries were involved, it will come as even less of a surprise that Luca Gargano who is associated privately and commercially with both, probably had a hand with the conceptual thinking behind it, and Velier, his company, is the European importer.

To be honest, I’ve never been entirely won over by multi-country blends which seek to bring out the best of more than one terroire by mixing things up.  Ocean’s rum took that to extremes and fell rather flat (I thought), the Compagnie des Indes’s blends are not always to my taste (though they sell gangbusters), the SBS Brazil-Barbados was meh – my feeling is that blends work better when they concentrate on one aspect of their home, not try to have several international citizens cohabitate under one cork. Veritas – it is known as Probitas in the USA for copyright / trademark reasons – may just be an exception that proves the rule (and true Navy rums are another).

Because, nosing it, it is clear that it is quite an interesting rum, even though it’s not really made for the sipping cognoscenti but for the cocktail crowd. The Hampden aromas of pot still funk dominate the initial nose — with glue, furniture polish, wax, acetone and ummm, oversweet garbage (which is not as bad as it sounds believe me) — it’s just that they don’t hit you over the head, and remain nicely restrained. They give way to crackers, cereals and a fruity mix of pineapples, strawberries, bubble gum, and then, like a violent storm passing by, the whole thing relaxes into vanilla, creme brulee, caramel, lemon meringue pie and some nice pine tarts. 

The balance on the tongue underscores this zen of these six different aspects: aged and unaged, pot and column, Barbados and Jamaican, and the flavours come like that gent in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises went broke: gradually, then suddenly, all at once. It’s sweet with funk and fruits and bubble gum, has a crisp sort of snap to it, not too much, and moves around the tasting wheel from creamy tartness of yoghurt, salara and sweet pastries, to a delicate citrus line of lemon peel, and then to caramel and vanilla, coconut shavings, bananas. The finish is a bit short and in contrast to the assertive scents and tastes, somewhat weak (ginger, tart fruits, some vanilla), but I think that’s okay: the rum is assembled to be a serious – even premium – cocktail mix, to make a bitchin’ daiquiri.  It’s not for the sipper, though for my money, it does pretty okay there too.

In fine, it’s a really good “in the middle” rum, one of the better ones I’ve had. The strength of 47% is near perfect for what it is: stronger might have been too sharp and overpowering, while a weaker proof would have allowed the notes to dissipate too quickly.  It’s hard to miss the Jamaican influence, and indeed it is a low-ester rum as dampened down by the Bajan component at the back end, and it works well for that.

When it really comes down to it, the only thing I didn’t care for is the name.  It’s not that I wanted to see “Jamados” or “Bamaica” on a label (one shudders at the mere idea) but I thought “Veritas” was just being a little too hamfisted with respect to taking a jab at Plantation in the ongoing feud with Maison Ferrand (the statement of “unsullied by sophistic dosage” pointed there).  As it turned out, my opinion was not entirely justified, as Richard Seale noted in a comment to to me that… “It was intended to reflect the simple nature of the rum – free of (added) colour, sugar or anything else including at that time even addition from wood. The original idea was for it to be 100% unaged. In the end, when I swapped in aged pot for unaged, it was just markedly better and just ‘worked’ for me in the way the 100% unaged did not.” So for sure there was more than I thought at the back of this title.

Still – “Truth” is what the word translates into, just as the US name “Probitas” signifies honesty, and uprightness. And the truth is that the distilleries involved in the making of this bartender’s delight are so famed for these standards that they don’t need to even make a point of it any longer – their own names echo with the stern eloquence of their quality already. The rum exists. It’s good, it speaks for itself, it’s popular.  And that’s really all it needs to do. Everything else follows from there.

(#784)(84/100)

Other notes

  • Part of the blend is lightly aged, hence the colour. I’m okay with calling it a white.
  • The barrel-and-shield on the label represents the organization known as “The Guardians of Rum” which is a loose confederation of producers and influencers who promote honesty in production, labelling and disclosure of and about rums.

Compagnie des Indes Veneragua 2018 13 Year Old Blended Rum – Review

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Dec 072020
 

In spite of being better known for the exceptional single cask line that made the name of the Compagnie des Indes (at least, with this writer), it was the later blends that sold a lot better and moved off the shelves with more alacrity. Independent bottlers are businessmen, and while sentiment may have them prefer the tuxedo-crowd snoot-rums, it’s the low-end tanker loads that keep the company afloat (a matter not restricted to the Compagnie) and therefore get made.

Compagnie des Indes has a whole lot more blends than is immediately apparent: the Darklice, Dominidad, Kaiman, Latino, Caraibes and Boulet de Canon series spring to mind (the Boulet is into its 9th iteration already), and more recently the West Indies, Jamaica and the Oktoberum series, and the subject of today’s review, the Veneragua.

This last is a blend of Venezuelan and Nicaraguan distillate (3 barrels from the former, 2 from the latter), with all the usual mystery behind the mashup.  That’s hardly a problem for the Nicaraguan component since that’s the Flor people, but Venezuela is a tad bigger and has a few more distilleries, so I’m not sure who provided that part. The outturn is 1911 bottles, making it a small- to mid-sized release (a single barrel release is usually 300 bottle or so).  We can assume it’s a light distillate, column still, and the label informs us it’s 13 years old, which I’m going to say was continental ageing all the way.  

More than that I don’t have so let’s move right along.  Nose first: it’s delicate fast-dissipating sugar-cane juice, grass and herbals, with a more solid core of caramel drizzled over condensed milk and shave-ice by the sno-cone man. Left standing for a while, it develops aromas of vanilla, cinnamon, licorice, white chocolate, ice cream and some light fruits – pears and raisins, mostly, and some lychees.

The palate is pretty nice to sip – the strength of 45% makes it warm and silky, with light tones and accents.  The tastes are primarily flowers and fruits and spices – nougat, almonds, grapes, raisins, and the crisp snap of ginger.  All underlain with caramel, tobacco, coffee grounds and red wine hints, some burnt sugar, but little in the way of tart acidic fruitiness that would balance these off. The finish was relatively short, with clear-cut vanilla, crushed walnuts, almonds and port-infused tobacco and a last bit of salted caramel. 

So, thoughts. I liked it…kind of. Nothing super exciting here, just a well done rum.  It lacked specificity, which has always been blended rums’ strength and weakness as a category, because a rum made for everyone in general is also one made for nobody in particular. Blends remain the same for long periods and are geared towards mass audiences, which may say something about the Compagnie’s strategy and long term marketing aims. It’s not often appreciated that erudite reviews of single barrel or limited releases, high points scores and fanboy partisanship may raise awareness and appreciation of a rum company’s halo products, but those are bought by a very tiny sliver of the purchasing public. They don’t shift the needle of the bottom line appreciably – in other words, there’s a reason why Bacardi and Tanduay and McDowell’s are the behemoths they are and smaller companies renowned for their single barrel cask strength rums are not.

I think Florent gets this very well.  Without making a big point of it, he continues issuing his limited editions from specific distilleries, just like IBs the world over do; but in the meantime, he has his eye on what pays the bills. The rums he blends do that and are, happily, quite good enough to please many.

Therefore, for anyone who wishes to just have a decent low strength sipping rum without a lot of complex and aggressive tastes and scents jostling and demanding attention, who desires a good drink with enough complexity at an affordable price to chase the evening away, the Veneragua is perfectly fine.  It simply chooses not to play in those rarefied regions inhabited by more limited and more exclusive drinks extolled by the never-silent uber-commentators. The Compagnie has other rums that live there.  This one happily moves in a more approachable, less exacting stratum.

(#783)(81/100)

Rum Nation Small Batch Rare Rums – Caroni 1997 21 Year Old – Review

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Dec 032020
 

Any independent bottler who’s been around for a few years always has rums at various tiers of quality, or premiumness.  Most of this has to do with increasingly elaborate packaging, marketing campaigns, price (of course) or just the hype surrounding the bottle. Though of course once we see a price tag in the hundreds (or thousands), and an age in the third decade or more, we tend to perk up and pay attention anyway without any prodding, right?

Rum Nation, a fomerly Italian-based IB has always been on board with this practice. Even back in 2011 when I bought their entire 2010 range at once, I could see they had their “starter rums” in tall barroom bottles which cost around $30-$60, and the rather more upscale Demeraras and Jamaicans which were more than two decades old, had cool wooden boxes and ran into three figures. You could tell those were special (and they remain so). Years later they changed the bottle shape to the more squat versions still in use today, but came out with a new series of cask strength small batch series they called the “Rare Rums” which had smaller outturns and were more expensive, and the seriously aged Demeraras and Jamaicans were retired.  

But even then Rum Nation went one step higher, with what one might term the Ultra Rares, of which so far, there have only been a few: a 1999 Port Mourant, a 30 Year Old blended Jamaican Long Pond from 1986, and a small number of lovely Caroni rums from the 1990s. This one, in a handsome box and flat presentation style 50cl bottle, was one from the noted year of 1997 (there a lot of Caroni rums from various IBs sporting that year of make, including one of the first I ever tried, the AD Rattray version). Bottled at 59.2% it had an Islay finish which had the virtue of at least making me curious, even if I had my doubts. And it did look really cool. 

What was it like? Short version, very Caroni-like.  Smelling it instantly brings back all the memories of the closed distillery – fresh tar being laid on a hot day, petrol, fusel oil, wax and plasticine boil out of the glass right from the start.  These aromas give way to brine and olives, iodine, acetones and nail polish, a sort of complex and medicinal amalgam that is then softened by caramel, unsweetened chocolate, almonds, cinnamon and hot, very strong black tea. I’m no peathead anorak like some of my friends, but I really could not fault that nose for the Islay touch it had.

The palate is as stern and uncompromising as an overcast day promising cold rain, and follows well from that nose. A shade bitter, it tastes of chocolate (again), tar, caramel, bags of dark fruits – dates, blackberries, prunes, raisins – with a background of vanilla, leather, smoke and sooty kerosene camping stoves farting black smoke.  It develops well from one flavour to the next and it’s well balanced but I think this may be a bit too much Caroni for some, like it was dialled to “11” in a fit of absentmindedness. Sometimes with rums like this it fails on the backstretch, choking and falling off just as it should be revving – in this case, the finish is no slouch…long and dry, dusty and sharp, tasting of aromatic cigar smoke, petrol, nuts, vanilla and a touch of cinnamon.  I really quite liked it, and feel it’s a good entry to the canon.

Rum Nation has had a solid bottling history under Fabio Rossi, was one of the first indies I ever tried, and was sold to a Danish concern back in late 2019.  The explosion of so many other indies over the last decade has dimmed its lustre, and in no way can any Trini rum in this day and age, by any bottler, compete with the Caroni juggernaut that is Velier, whether or not they’re better.  But I still believe this is an enormously tasty rum and that peaty Islay finish complemented the fusel oil and kero notes for which the closed distillery is so famed, making for an intriguing and darkly delicious drink that can’t be discounted.  

It is, at end, just a really good bottling, represents the shuttered Trinidadian distillery with force and elan; and with all the fuss and bother and sometimes-insane prices of favoured Caroni bottles from Luca’s immense hoard, it might not be out to lunch to suggest that even with the price tag this one has, it’s worth it. Try it first, if you can, or if you have reservations – because if you’re on a Caroni field exploration trip, and want a good ‘un, you could do a lot worse than Rum Nation’s entry to the pantheon.

(#782)(86/100)

Other Notes

  • Outturn is unknown, unfortunately
  • Ageing is assumed to be in Europe

Chamarel Premium Double Distilled White Rum – Review

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Nov 302020
 

It says “rum” on the label, but for all intents and purposes we should be calling it rhum. Chamarel made it out of cane juice on the island of Mauritius, and it’s an easy-going, sweet-smelling, good-tempered cane juice rhum that got wrung out of a pot still on the island and somehow didn’t turn into some foul-smelling, cantankerous harridan in the process.  That’s probably deliberate, because had they done so, while it might have enthused the fanboys of unaged white lightning made in the backwoods, it might also cost a sale or two among the less adventurously minded.

Suffice to say, the rhum derives from cane that is grown and harvested on their estate, crushed within the day and the juice fermented for around 36 hours; then it’s run twice through Chamarel’s small (20 hL) copper pot stills and that’s about it.  Into the bottle with you, at a workmanlike 44%, white as water. It presents demurely and innocently – nothing to see here, folks, move along.

What comes out of it and into your glass is, to say the least, surprising.  You know me, I like those feral white rums north of 60% that barely contain their untamed ferocity and wild screaming tastes, and strut around thumping their chests like King Kong in a glass.  This one isn’t anything like that.  It’s warm and firm, with a sort gentle complexity rising to the nose: brine, olives, wax, swank, and watery fruit like pears and white guavas.  There’s a nice snap of sugar cane juice here, coconut water, vanilla, and a bagful of fruits that aren’t aggrieved and pissed off so much as resigned to just chilling out. 

On the tongue it gets crisper, clearer: which is good in its own way, yet creates other problems, the most notable of which is that it becomes evident that there are just a few clean tastes here, and that’s all. Light vanilla, cereals, nuts, almonds and chocolate, developing gradually into some acidic yellow fruits (unripe mangoes, pears, apricots) and a subtle line of citrus that could have been stronger.  It’s pleasant and easy to drink, and the finish is short and breezy — fruits and vanilla and some white chocolate — with nothing substantially new to add.

Overall, it’s a perfectly nice drink, yet I’m left vaguely dissatisfied, since it started so well and then just kind of dribbled away into an anonymity from which I felt the pot still and lack of ageing should have saved it. Was it perhaps too well tended and planed away to appeal to the masses?  Maybe.

So, no, this isn’t Rumzilla, or a King Kong of the blancs.  But with some effort it might get close to that big bad boy, because you can sense the potential, were it to be stronger and babied less in the cuts, allowed to have its head to go (no pun intended) a little ape. Then it could be, at the very least, the Son of Kong.  In a nice little perfume box.  I could completely live with that.

(#781)(79/100)

Other Notes

La Rhumerie de Chamarel, located in a small valley in the south west of Mauritius, cultivates its own sugarcane, and has a history on the island going back centuries. The distillery takes the title of a small nearby village named after a Frenchman who lived there around 1800 and owned most of the land upon which the village now rests. The area has had long-lived plantations growing pineapples and sugar cane, and in 2008 the owners of the Beachcomber Hotel chain (New Mauritius Hotels, one of the largest companies in Mauritius), created the new distillery on their estate of 400 hectares, at a time of weakening demand and reduced EU subsidies. Rum really started taking off in post 2006 when production was legalized – previously all sugar cane had to be processed into sugar by law. 

The sugar cane is grown onsite and cut without pre-burning between July and December. The harvest is transported directly to the distillery and the crushed sugarcane juice filtered and taken to steel tanks for fermentation after which the wash is run through a copper Barbet-type plate still (for white rums), or the two-column 24-plate still they call an alembic (for aged and other rums). In all cases the rums are left post-distillation in inert stainless steel vats for three months before being transferred to ageing barrels of various kinds, or released as white rums, or further processed into spiced variations.

Naga Double Cask Aged Indonesia Rum – Review

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Nov 262020
 

The Naga double-cask aged rum is part of the company’s standard lineup without any fancy whistles and bells, and when you nose it, you get a sensory impression both hauntingly familiar and obscurely strange. Even dialled-down and wispy as it is, it reminds one of chocolate, very ripe dark cherries, Fanta, sweet caramel, bonbons, and delicate perfumed flowers; and it’s the extras beneath all that which add piquancy and puzzlement: white pepper, a foamy Guinness stout, and a gamey, meaty smell which is fortunately quite faint. 

The rum, bottled at 40%, exists outside the comforting confines of the Caribbean and gently charts its own course, which may account for its subtle oddity.  Part of that is how it’s made: from molasses, yes, but fermented using yeast made from malted Javanese red rice. And while the rum is a blend of both pot and column still distillates made in all the usual ways, it is aged for a period in casks made from type of teak called jatti, and the remainder in bourbon casks – but alas, at this point I don’t know how much ageing in either or in total.

This process provides a tasting profile that reminds me of nothing so much than a slightly addled wooden still-rum from El Dorado: it’s sweet, feels the slightest bit sticky, and has strong notes of dark fruits, red licorice, plums, raisins and an almond chocolate bar gone soft in the heat. There’s other stuff in there as well – some caramel, vanilla, pepper again, light orange peel, but overall the whole thing is not particularly complex, and it ambles easily towards a short and gentle finish of no particular distinction that pretty much displays some dark fruit, caramel, anise and molasses, and that’s about it.

Naga is a rum company from Indonesia that was formed around 2016 by (you guessed it) another one of those roving French spirits-loving entrepreneurs, and from the lack of distillation facilities on its FB page, the constant switching around of labels and names for its rums on its website, I think it probably works a bit like Rhum Island, sourcing its distillate from another company, and adjusts swiftly to the market to tweak blends and titles to be more attractive to customers.  I have queries outstanding to them about their production details and historical background so there’s not much to go on right now, and this rum may already be called something else, since it is not on their web listing.

So, until we know more, focus on the rum itself.  It’s quiet and gentle and some cask strength lovers might say – not without justification – that it’s insipid. It has some good tastes, simple but okay, and hews to a profile with which we’re not entirely unfamiliar. It has a few off notes and a peculiar substrate of something different, which is a good thing.  So in the end, recognizably a product you know, recognizably a rum, but…not entirely. That doesn’t make it bad, just its own drink. “It’s a rum,” you write in your notebook, and then words run out; so you try some more to help yourself out, and you’ll likely still be searching for words to describe it properly by the time you realize with some surprise that the glass is empty. It’s weird how that happens. 

(#780)(77/100)

Other notes

  • The rum has its antecedents in arrack, a proto-rum from Indonesia where it was first identified by the Dutch and Portuguese in the town of Batavia, the former name for Jakarta. It has a fair similarity to By The Dutch’s Batavia Arrack, but is not as good. I thought the older version, Naga’s Java Reserve, was a touch better too. 
  • I am unsure about the age, but it feels quite young, under five years I’d say. 
  • Naga is a Sanskrit-based word referring to the mythical creature of Asia, a dragon or large snake, that guards the treasures of the earth, and is also a symbol of prosperity and protection.

Velier Diamond / Versailles (SVSG) 18 Year Old Rum – Review

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Nov 232020
 

Sooner or later in these reviews, I always end up circling back to Velier, and for preference, it’s usually the rums from the Age of the Demeraras.  It’s not that I have anything against the Caronis in their near-infinite variations, the Habitation’s pot still range, or the series of the New Hampdens, Villa Paradisetto or 70th anniversary. And I have a soft spot for even the smaller and more exactingly selected outturns of one-offs like the Courcelles or the Basseterre rums. It’s just that the Demeraras speak to me more, and remind me of the impact a then-relatively-unknown indie bottler had when it rearranged the rum landscape and worldviews of many rum aficionados back in the day. 

By the time this rum was released in 2014, things were already slowing down for Velier in its ability to select original, unusual and amazing rums from DDLs warehouses, and of course it’s common knowledge now that 2014 was in fact the last year they did so.  The previous chairman, Yesu Persaud, had retired that year and the arrangement with Velier was discontinued as DDL’s new Rare Collection was issued (in early 2016) to supplant them.

While this rum was hyped as being “Very Rare” and something special, I am more of the impression it was an experiment on the order of the four “coloured” edition rums DDL put out in 2019, something they had had on the go in their skunkworks, that Luca Gargano spotted and asked to be allowed to bottle.  It was one of four he released that year, and perhaps illustrates that the rabbit was getting progressively harder to pull out of the hat.

Still, the stats on the as-usual nicely informative label were pretty good: two barrels of serious distillates – the Versailles single wooden pot still and the Diamond metal coffey still (proportions unknown, alas) — yielding 570 bottles. A hefty strength of 57.9%; 18 years of tropical ageing while the two profiles married and learned how to live together without a divorce, and an angel’s share of about 78%.

How then, did such an unusual amalgam of a coffey still and a wooden pot still come out smelling and tasting like after so long? Like a Demerara rum is the short answer. A powerful one. This was a Demerara wooden still profile to out-Demerara all other wooden-still Demeraras (well…at least it tried to be). There was the characteristic licorice of the wooden stills, of course.  Aromatic tobacco, coffee grounds, strong and unsweetened black tea; and after a while a parade of dark fruits – raisins, prunes, black dates – set off by a thin citrus line pf lemon zest, and cumin.  Ah but that was not all, for this was followed some time later when I returned to the glass, by sawdust, rotting leaves after a rain, acetones, furniture polish and some pencil shavings, cinnamon and vanilla…quit a lot to unpack. It was fortunate I was trying it at home and not somewhere were time was at a premium, and could take my time with the tasting.

The nose had been so stuffed with stuff (so to speak) that the palate had a hard time keeping up.  The strength was excellent for what it was, powerful without sharpness, firm without bite. But the whole presented as somewhat more bitter than expected, with the taste of oak chips, of cinchona bark, or the antimalarial pills I had dosed on for my working years in the bush.  Thankfully this receded, and gave ground to cumin, coffee, dark chocolate, coca cola, bags of licorice (of course), prunes and burnt sugar (and I mean “burnt”). It felt thick and heavy and had a nice touch of creme brulee and whupped cream bringing up the rear, all of which segued into a lovely long finish of coffee grounds, minty chocolate and oranges, licorice again, and a few more overripe fruits.

Overall, not lacking or particularly shabby. Completely solid rum. The tastes were strong and it went well by itself as a solo drink. That said, although it was supposed to be a blend, the lighter column still tastes never really managed to take over from the powerful Versailles profile – but what it did do was change it, because my initial thinking was that if I had not known what it was, I would have said Port Mourant for sure. In some of the crisper, lighter fruity notes the column distillate could be sensed, and it stayed in the background all the way, when perhaps a bit more aggression there would have balanced the whole drink a bit more. 

Nowadays (at the close of 2020), the rum fetches around £500 / US$800 or so at auction or on specialty spirits sites, which is in line with other non-specific Velier rums from the Late Age clocking in at under two decades’ ageing. Does that make it undervalued, something to pounce on?  I don’t think so.  It lacks a certain clear definition of what it is and may be too stern and uncompromising for many who prefer a more clear-cut Port Mourant or Enmore rum, than one of these experimentals. If after all this time its reputation has not made it a must-have, then we must accept that it is not one of the Legendary Bottles that will one day exceed five grand – simply an interesting variation of a well known series of rums, a complete decent sipping rum, yet not really a top-tier product of the time, or the line.

(#779)(85/100)

Other notes

  • The four 2014 Velier “blended-in-the-barrel” experimentals were:
    • Port Mourant / Enmore Experimental 1998 16YO (1998 – 2014), 62.2%
    • Port Mourant / Diamond Experimental 1995 19YO (1995 – 2014), 62.1%
    • Port Mourant / Diamond Experimental 1999 15 YO (1999 – 2014), 52.3.%
    • Diamond / Versailles Experimental 1996 18 YO (1996 – 2014), 57.9%
  • DDL’s own four rums of the 2019 “coloured” series referred to above were 
    • PM/Uitvlugt/Diamond 2010 9YO at 49.6% (violet),
    • Port Mourant/Uitvlugt 2010 9YO at 51% (orange),
    • Uitvlugt/Enmore 2008 11YO 47.4% (blue)
    • Diamond/Port Mourant 2010 9YO at 49.1% (teal).

The jury is still out on how good (or not) the DDL versions are. So far I have not seen many raves about them and they seem to have dropped out of sight rather rapidly.

Samaroli Grenada 1993 22 Year Old Rum – Review

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Nov 192020
 

Recently I was observed to be writing more reviews of obscure rums nobody ever hears about (or can get) than the commonly favoured tipple and new releases favoured by the commenterati.  That’s a completely fair thing to say, because I do. Not because I want to be behind the times — I’m gutted I couldn’t try the three new pot-still Appletons from Velier so many people are waxing rhapsodical about, for example —  it’s more a factor of my current location, and inability to travel and the cancellation of the entire 2020 rumfest season.

It’s also as a somewhat deliberate choice. After all, there are loads of people rendering opinions on what’s out there that’s and new and interesting, so what more could one blogger really add? And so I take advantage of these admittedly peculiar circumstances to write about rums that are less well known, a bit off the beaten track, but no less fascinating. Because there will always be, one day, years from now, questions about such bottles — even if only by a single individual finding a dust-covered specimen on some back shelf someplace, written off by the store or owner, ignored by everyone else.  

One such is this Samaroli rum sporting an impressive 22 years of continental ageing, hailing from Grenada – alas, not Rivers Antoine, but you can’t have everything (the rum very likely came from Westerhall – they ceased distilling in 1996 but were the only ones exporting bulk rum before that). You’ll look long and hard before you find any kind of write up about it, or anyone who owns it – not surprising when you consider the €340 price tag it fetches in stores and at auction.  This is the second Grenada rum selected under the management of Antonio Bleve who took over operations at Samaroli in the mid 2000s and earned himself a similar reputation as Sylvio Samaroli (RIP), that of having the knack of picking right. 

I would not suggest, however, that this is entirely the case here.  The rum noses decently enough (it clocks in at 45% ABV) and smells pungently sweet, akin to a smoked-out beehive dripping honey into the ashes. There’s caramel toffee, bon bons, cinnamon, white chocolate and a kind of duskiness to the aroma that isn’t bad. After some time additional smells of vanilla and salted caramel ice cream can be detected, but on the whole it’s not very heavy in the fruits department.  Some plums and dark berries, and a bare minimum of the tart notes of sharper fruit to balance them off.

The palate is, frankly, something of a disappointment after a nose that was already not all that exciting to begin with. Many of the notes that are present when I smell it return for a subtler encore when sampled: salted caramel ice cream, a dulce de leche coffee, more white chocolate with some nuttiness, honey, caramel, cinnamon, and very few crisp fruits that would have livened up the experience some.  Raisins, dates, dried plums is more or less it and I really have no idea what the back label is on about when it refers to “typical Spanish style.” The finish is similarly middle of the road, as if fearing to offend, and gives up a few final notes of cinnamon, chocolate, raisins, plums and toffee, dusted with a bit of vanilla, and that’s about all you’re getting.

So what to make of this expensive two-decades-old Grenada rum released by an old and proud Italian house? Overall it’s really quite pleasant, avoids disaster and is tasty enough, just nothing special. I was expecting more. You’d be hard pressed to identify its provenance if tried blind. Like an SUV taking the highway, it stays firmly on the road without going anywhere rocky or offroad, perhaps fearing to nick the paint or muddy the tyres. 

The problem with that kind of undistinguished anonymity which takes no chances, is that it provides the drinker with no new discoveries, no new challenges, nothing to write home in shock and awe about. To some extent, I’d suggest the rum is a product of its time – in 2005, IBs were still much more cautious about releasing cask-strength, hairy-chested beefcakes that reordered the rumiverse, and were careful not too stray too far from the easy blends which was what sold big time back then. That’s all well and good, but it also shows that those who don’t dare, don’t win … and that’s why this rum is all but forgotten and unacknowledged now (unlike, of course, the Veliers from the same era). In short, it lacks distinctiveness and character, and remains merely a good way to drop two hundred quid without getting much of anything in return.

(#778)(80/100)

Other Notes

  • 320 bottles of the 0.7 liter edition appeared….and another 120 bottles of a 0.5 liter edition
  • The first Grenada rum selected by Bleve was the 1993-2011 45% with a blue label.

Island Cane “Red Cane” Rhum Agricole Blanc 53º – Review

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Nov 162020
 

It’s when you sniff this understated and really quite excellent agricole from Marie Galante that you gain some sense of how well made both it and the green labelled “standard” blanc 50º are.  The Green Label — my term, not theirs — was good and I really liked it, but this one was a few degrees stronger and a few degrees better and makes a good case for both the utilization of specific cane varietals and a single source of origin.

Briefly, Rhum Island – a company founded in 2017 – issues rhums which are bottled in Saint Martin (a small island south of Anguilla shared by Holland and France, which has no sugar industry to speak of), sourced from distilleries on Guadeloupe and Marie Galante (it varies depending on the bottling). Whether it comes from Bielle, Pere Labat (Poisson), Capovilla or Bellevue (in this case), is anyone’s guess – as I noted, the guys at the booth who kept filling my glass kept that close to their vests. Perhaps it was/is the distilleries themselves who were shyly demure about their names being used by what is, at end, another indie bottler, albeit from the Caribbean itself. 

In short, however, the marketing blurb tells us that the rhum comes from “red cane”, and is meant to be pure agricultural monovarietal white rhum, initially distilled on column stills at 78% ABV and gradually reduced to 53% ABV, with no additives, no filtration and no ageing.

All that comes together in a rhum of uncommonly original aroma and taste. It opens with smells that confirm its provenance as an agricole, and it displays most of the hallmarks of a rhum from the blanc side (herbs, grassiness, crisp citrus and tart fruits)…but that out of the way, evidently feels it is perfectly within its rights to take a screeching ninety degree left turn into the woods.  Woody and even meaty notes creep out, which seem completely out of place, yet somehow work. This all combines with salt, rancio, brine, and olives to mix it up some more, but the overall effect is not unpleasant – rather it provides a symphony of undulating aromas that move in and out, no single one ever dominating for long before being elbowed out of the way by another.

The palate is crisp and clean and invites one to keep sipping and tasting to see what else can be wrung out, what else can be discovered. If you can believe it, it’s even more interesting than the nose – deeper somehow, more forceful and assertive, making the point less with a smorgasbord of flavours or sharp stabs to the glottis (though both are definitely present), than a sort of firm and complex strength. There were tastes of lemon custard, salt-pimento-flavoured chocolate, sweet herbs like fennel and rosemary, 7-up, candy floss and crushed walnuts and a nice medley of green apples, citrus peel, grapes, and yellow mangoes, around which flitted occasional minerally notes, olives, salt, sweet soya, and at no time, in spite of the strength, does it lose the peculiar delicacy that had also marked its brother. I also enjoyed the finish, which was long and aromatic, leaving behind the memory of bitter chocolate, grass, sugar cane sap, salt, and a herbal vegetable soup and with sweet cane vinegar.

In short, I thought this was a really fantastic white rhum. As I remarked above, it doesn’t say from which plantation / estate on Marie Galante it hails, but my own feeling is that it is not a blend – the tasting coordinates dial in too precisely, it’s too lacking in the smooth, carefully-mixed, please-all-comers anonymity to be a blend, and in any case, what are the chances that a single varietal’s cane is harvested at the same time, crushed to juice at the same time, on multiple estates, and then brought together to form a blend?  No, I’m suggesting this is one estate’s rhum, and I wish I knew which one it was, because it’s one damned fine white rhum, affordable and right tasty, and I really want some more. It’s a blanc rhum to treasure.

(#777)(87/100)

Other Notes

  • The label shown above was changed shortly after April 2019, and the new version looks like this:

Photo provided courtesy of Rhum Island

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