Sep 152023
 

Rumaniacs Review R-158 | #1025

Most people in the UK are familiar with the Woods brand and the rise of online auctions over the last years spread knowledge further, so it’s become reasonably common knowledge that Woods was founded in 1887 and bought by William Grant & Sons from Diageo in 2002 along with OVD and Vat 19. However, Diageo’s ownership seems to have been rather recent – they acquired the Woods brand from Seagram in 2000 when that company merged with Vivendi and divested some of its properties.

1955 Advertisement for Wood’s Old Charlie

Seagram’s acquisition of Woods was much earlier, though: there is a reference that in during the Second World War, Seagram “imported rum from Puerto Rico and Jamaica, which led to the purchase of distilleries in the Caribbean that produced Captain Morgan, Myers’s, Wood’s and Trelawny rums.” This is probably Longpond and Clarendon in Jamaica (the  Puerto Rico operations are outside the scope of this article); and a 2009 paper by Graham Taylor notes that “Between 1952 and 1956, Sherriff & Co. of Jamaica, Wood & Co., Ltd., Robert Legge & Co., Ltd., and Myers Rum Co., Ltd., of Nassau were all added to the Seagram empire.”

Whoever owned it and whether a company favoured Jamaica or Guyana for the releases, Wood’s remains a successful brand on sale to this day – supposedly still using the original recipe for Navy rum (which is unlikely, but ok, that’s marketing for you). For the most part they have acted as merchant bottlers, blending and bottling rums from  the British Caribbean, primarily Jamaica and Guyana – the current Old Navy Rum is all Guyana, for example while there is no sign of a Jamaica – and vacillated between 40% and 57% ABV over the decades, depending on what they were making.

Not much has changed since I first wrote about Woods 100 Navy Rum ten years ago – the site remains a receptacle of no-information. We have no sense of who the movers and shakers of the original company were, what other rums they made, how the labels changed over the years, the different bottlings, the heritage, the history, the 2002 sale, nothing. And to add insult to injury, there’s not even a mention of the Old Charlie rum, let alone who he was, and nowadays, this version is neither made nor listed on the website. Stuff like this makes me despair for the next generation of rum writers and researchers.

Colour – Amber

Strength – 70° Proof / 40% ABV

Nose – Solid aromas here…but initially quite peculiar. Peeling wallpaper, tatty paper, cardboard and old books in the bookshelves of back alley second hand bookstores where you might find a first edition of Rums of the Eastern Caribbean gathering dust. Chocolate, vanilla, coffee, brine, cream puffs, ginger bread cookies, lemon meringue pie…a sort of olfactory dessert table, accompanied by enough faux leather to outfit a bunch of wannabe hoods doing a doo-whop on the corner. Or maybe Adam West just flew by in new rubber threads, who knows – the rum is old, it could be anything

Palate – Not bad.  Iodine, ethanol, acetone, all burning off fast. Some licorice (rather light), caramel, vanilla, toffee, all the usual that suggests something of a nascent Appleton from Ago but which remains hard to define precisely. Brine, hot black tea, fish oil, olives. It’s not very sweet, rather more like tart. Nuts and too-old, too-strong, too-bitter percolated coffee, yet for all that, I liked it.

Finish – Short. Nothing special here, a recap at best. Dry, some ripe fruits, raisins, chocolate, coffee.

Thoughts –  It’s okay. A lot of muskiness, a sort of dry spiciness, not so much in the funk department. It’s hard to pinpoint the rums origin as Jamaican beyond doubt (although there’s no real reason to) because the crisp clarity of today’s funky island rums which we have learned to grade so well, is missing — and so to say which estate distillery made it, or even that it’s Jamaican at all, is harder than it appears. Still, the general profile of the rum remains consistent with others from the brand I’ve sampled over the years, and if auction sites come up with these older 1970s and 1960s and earlier Woods rums, I’d buy them on general principles, and not just for the history.

(82/100) ⭐⭐⭐½


Other Notes

  • My thanks and deep appreciation to Nicolai Wachmann who sent me the sample, knowing of my love and interest in older and almost forgotten rums.
  • The exact dating and bottling of the rum is unclear. Given the source, I think 1970s is a reasonable estimate – a bottle from the 1960s strikes me as being too rare on the secondary market and by the late 1970s the ° Proof symbol was replaced by % ABV.
  • Age is unknown, still unknown, estate/distillery is unconfirmed to be (possibly) Long Pond or Clarendon.
Aug 052013
 

D7K_2782

 

Rich, simply flavoured, overproofed Navy-style rum that has a skinnier corpus than expected

There’s nothing much I can tell you about Wood’s Rum Distillery itself because (a) it’s not a distillery and (b) there’s not much online about it, even on their own website (and my books barely speak to the big names so what hope is there for the small ones?), but the brand did exist for over a century before being acquired by William Grant in 2002 – these are the boys who also own Sailor Jerry and the OVD rum brands and supposedly dabble in minor whiskies like Glenfiddich and Balvenie (or so rumour has it).  They are, however, blenders…descendants of the merchant bottlers of the old days. I wish, on the strength of what I tasted here, that I knew more about the company’s origins and how it got into the Navy rum market. It’s perhaps kind of appropriate that I bought it at Heathrow, Britain’s largest modern equivalent to the old ports.

The first noticeable, unmistakable aromas that billowed forth as I cracked the cheap tinfoil cap, were huge, in-your-face biffs of molasses, licorice and coffee. They were deep and dark and rich and had it not been for the rather raw profile overall, I could be forgiven for thinking the rum was an old Demerara from Enmore, or even a Dictador 20 on steroids. Which is not too surprising, because Woods made a rum here which took the characteristic dark pot still distillates from DDL in Guyana (one source suggests some column distillate is used as well, about which I have my doubts, but okay), aged them in oak for up to three years and then bottled the result without gelding the poor thing to 40%…but remained at a chest-hair-curling 57%. Drink this neat and you’ll feel like a hobbit drinking with Treebeard. So good for them, methinks. The intensity remained, the darkness persisted, in any kind of cocktail the tastes stayed true, and frankly, Navy rums should be a tad more oomphed up than the norm, otherwise they wouldn’t (to my mind anyway) be Navy rums.

D7K_2783

What about the taste? Well, pretty much what you would expect, all in all (come on, were you really expecting a swan to emerge from an eighteen-quid duckling?). Woods 100 was a dark red, almost black rum — which had been part of the initial attraction for me — poured inkily into the glass, and when sipped conformed as closely to the anticipated profile as one James Bond movie does to another: spicy, rich, dark melange of flavours promised by the nose. And these were the same molasses, burnt sugar, coffee and licorice overtones, which buried the subtler elements as completely as an alpine avalanche. Sure, I found sly and supple hints of chopped fruits, cinnamon, vanilla, ripe cherries and cashews, but not enough to really stand out…the balance was all towards the dominant notes. The finish was, as befitted an overproof, long and lasting, giving more of the molasses and burnt sugar, quite heated and a shade dry. But, of course, with claws.

It should be pointed out that I felt the rum teetered on the edge of being medium bodied, because it was harsher on the tongue and one the fade than I had anticipated, thinner (perhaps I’ve been spoiled by El Dorados)…there’s an element of rawness to it, a lack of refinement and couth which points to the short maturation. Still, it’s young, it’s brawny, it’s cheap, it’s not like I should expect a miracle: like any young stud, strength is the selling point, not staying power or finnesse.

There are many rums like Wood’s on my shelf, which says a lot for my affections when it comes to sweaty, prole-centric, cane-cutter rums I don’t necessarily sip. Cabot Tower 100, Favell, Young’s Old Sam are the first that spring to mind, but also Robert Watson, some of the old Enmores (better made, older and smoother but not quite as cheerily nutso as this ‘un), Pusser’s or Lamb’s. I’d place this one about on par with the Cabot’s (which scored 78).

D7K_2784

But y’know, Demerara rum seem to be good no matter what, and that is particularly true of the wooden pot still products. Whether they are made to sip and savour (like BBR’s Port Morant 1975 or Bristol Spirits PM 1980) or to get one hammered (all the others named above), they all have that deep, rich fruity molasses note within their variations, and this one stands forward to take its place loudly and proudly (even obnoxiously) among all the others. The fact that many online shop-commentaries resound with the plaudits of ex Royal Navy men who esteem Woods above just about any other Navy rum says all, I think, that needs to be said about this cheerful, powerful, unpretentious cask-strength rum.

(#176. 80/100)


Other notes

  • In passing, why name it “100” when it’s actually 114 proof? Well, here I’d refer you to my essay on poofage, but in fine, in the old maritime days, 100 proof was a measure of the least (most diluted) ratio of alcohol to water which would still support the combustion of gunpowder. And that equated to about 57% ABV. This was called 100 proof.