Longueteau Très Vieux Grande Réserve 2004 Rhum – Review

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Jun 072016
 
Longueteau Très Vieux Grande Réserve 2004 Rhum - Review

Strong beginning, fine development, chokes on the backstretch There are many things about agricoles that I slowly learned to appreciate: the clear profiles, the subtleties of their ageing, the differences and similarities with the molasses based rums that some almost indifferently dismiss as ‘industrials.’ So far I seem to be leaning more towards Guadeloupe rhums than those from Martinique, and while the Grande Reserve I sampled in Paris in April 2016 wasn’t one of the shining stars of the firmament, it wasn’t all that bad either and I had several hours to come to grips with it properly Longueteau distillery [Click here for the full review…]


Professor Cornelius Ampleforth Rumbullion – Review

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May 312016
 
Professor Cornelius Ampleforth Rumbullion - Review

Too much spice, too much sugar, too little interest. The name is almost Dickensian in its imagery.  Professor Cornelius Ampleforth could be straight out of the Pickwick Papers…you know, some chubby, benevolent older fellow in half-specs and a faded waistcoat, with rather limited mental capacity, down on his heels, but possessing a good heart. Whatever – the name evokes a certain good humour and indulgence from us, and at the very least is evocative.  That, unfortunately, doesn’t make the Professor’s Rumbullion a rum worth drinking, unless you are into spiced rums and like to have that in your drink (which [Click here for the full review…]


Navy Neaters 95.5º Proof (Guyana-Barbados Blended) Rum – Review

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May 252016
 
Navy Neaters 95.5º Proof (Guyana-Barbados Blended) Rum - Review

A blue-water rum for the Navy men of yore. This may be one of the best out-of-production independent bottlings from Ago that I’ve had.  It’s heavy but no too much, tasty without excess, and flavourful without too many offbeat notes.  That’s quite an achievement for a rum made in the 1970s, even more so when you understand that it’s actually a blend of Guyanese and Bajan rums, a marriage not always made in heaven. I’ve trawled around the various blogs and fora and articles looking for references to it, but about all I can find is that (a) Jolly Jack [Click here for the full review…]


Nine Leaves Angel’s Half Rum (French Oak Cask)(2015) – Review

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May 182016
 
Nine Leaves Angel's Half Rum (French Oak Cask)(2015) - Review

A love note to the concept of kaizen It’s an old joke of mine that Nine Leaves’ staff consists of  a master blender, office assistant, purchasing agent, bottler, General Manager, brand ambassador and sales office, and still only has one employee.  This was and remains Mr. Yoshiharu Takeuchi, who single-handedly runs his company in the Shiga Prefecture of Japan, and basically issues some very young rums (none are older than six months) on to the world market. The unaged whites in particular are getting all sorts of acclaim, and I have one to write about in the near future. Back [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Bacardi Superior “Carta de Oro” Añejo – 1970s

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May 162016
 
Ron Bacardi Superior "Carta de Oro" Añejo - 1970s

Rumaniacs Review 022 | 0422 On the surface, rums like this one remind one how long Bacardi has been around (as if we could forget);  the Superior has also had a long history – I found a photo dating back to the 1930s.  This one is of more recent vintage, the 1970s, and made in the Bahamas (and that’s where I’ll tag it).  Other versions of this rum were made in Trinidad and Cuba, some white, some not.  The labelling of “Carta de Oro” and “Añejo” and the colour, however, makes this a lightly aged product, less than five years [Click here for the full review…]


Neisson Rhum Agricole 2005 Vieux – Review

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May 152016
 
Neisson Rhum Agricole 2005 Vieux - Review

There are few (if any) weaknesses here: conversely, not many stellar individual components either.  It’s just an all-round solidly assembled product that missed being greater by a whisker. So here we are, gradually inching up the scale of the Neissons, with a rum I felt was slightly better than the Tatanka I looked at some weeks ago.  Now, that one had a bright, colourful label to catch the eye (Cyril from DuRhum did a review of the lineup, here), and yet appearance aside, this one was, in my estimation, a smidgen better. It’s a subtle kind of thing, having to [Click here for the full review…]


Rhum J.M. Vieux Millesime 2002 10 Year Old

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May 112016
 
Rhum J.M. Vieux Millesime 2002 10 Year Old

A wonderfully sippable AOC agricole from J.M. in Martinique The unquantifiable quality of the J.M. 1995 Très Vieux 15 Year Old has stayed with me ever since I first tried it.  Some aspects of the rhum did not entirely succeed, but I could never entirely rid my memory of its overall worth, and so deliberately sought out others from the stable of the company to see if the experience was a unique one.  And I am happy to report that the Millesime 2002 10 year old is a sterling product in its own way, and perhaps slightly exceeds the 1995…though [Click here for the full review…]


Compagnie des Indes 1998 Guadeloupe 16 Year Old Rum – Review

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May 082016
 
Compagnie des Indes 1998 Guadeloupe 16 Year Old Rum - Review

A lovely, light rum , as elegant as a Viennese waltz: it’s missing something at the back end, but nothing that would make me consider telling anyone to steer clear.  Compagnie des Indes so intrigued me when I first came across their Cuban rum back in early 2015, that I’ve already looked at two of their more offbeat products (from Fiji and Indonesia), and have detailed notes on five more commercially minded ones, which I’ll try to deal with in the next weeks and months (in between every other rum I want to write about).  This one hails from Guadeloupe [Click here for the full review…]


Mana’o Jus de Canne Rhum Blanc – Review

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May 042016
 
Mana'o Jus de Canne Rhum Blanc - Review

Cool stoicism and subdued power, all in one rhum. Standard “table” white rums have always been around, and perhaps appeal more to those mix them into gentle cocktails and go on to play Doom II  on “Please Don’t Hurt Me” difficulty.  In the main, the best known ones were — and are — filtered, light mixing agents which made to adhere to a philosophy best described as “We aim not to piss you off.” They excite a “ho-hum” rather than a “wtf?” Not so the current crop of clear, unaged rums which have been making  an increasing splash in our [Click here for the full review…]


GDL El Dorado Bonded Reserve Rum – Review

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Apr 282016
 
GDL El Dorado Bonded Reserve Rum - Review

A rum from Ago.  Perhaps only a Guyanese or a retired British Navy man could truly love it. For the most part, over the last months I’ve concentrated on fairly well known rums, made by bottlers with whom we’re all reasonably familiar. Today, I’m going to reach into the past a bit, to the Guyana Distillers El Dorado Bonded Reserve. Sorry, what? I can hear you say, You mean DDL don’t you, Mr. Caner? Yeah…and no.  This rum was made in the early 1980s before DDL changed its name, and in it was one of those hooches like the King [Click here for the full review…]


Banks DIH XM Royal Gold 10 Year Old – Review

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Apr 252016
 
Banks DIH XM Royal Gold 10 Year Old - Review

For me this is a rum that evokes real nostalgia, even though I’ve mostly moved past it. I enjoy storytelling, but if rambling background notes and local anecdotes are not your thing, skip three paragraphs. It was a fact of life in Guyana in the 1980s and 1990s that as one moved up the income scale from poor to less poor, one upgraded from Lighthouse matches to bic lighters to zippos; from leaky, loosely packed Bristol cigarettes to Benson & Hedges (gold pack, preferably made in the UK, not Barbados), and stopped swilling the pestilential King of Diamonds (which nowadays [Click here for the full review…]


Velier Enmore (Versailles Still) 1988 19 Year Old Rum – Review

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Apr 222016
 
Velier Enmore (Versailles Still) 1988 19 Year Old Rum - Review

It is a rum of enormous taste and great breadth of profile…and if it had been a little less serious, a little more forceful, I would have called mine Falstaff. In spite of its light blonde colour, there has always been something dark and dour, almost Heathcliff-ish, about the Enmore rums, including this 1988 variation (maybe it’s the bottle design of black-on-dark-red). It’s a brilliantly done piece of work, a drone-quality delivery system for ensuring your taste buds get every bit of nuance that can be squeezed out.  And that, let me tell you, is quite a bit. So many people [Click here for the full review…]


St. Nicholas Abbey White Rum – Review

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Apr 132016
 
St. Nicholas Abbey White Rum - Review

A tasty, unaged, pot-still white rum, which St. Nicholas Abbey seems to have made while in a playfully experimental phase. So there I was last week, reading through my notes and writing unenthusiastically about the 3 year old “Real McCoy” white rum from Barbados, which found little favour with me.  But consider this unaged counterpart made right up the road from St. Nicholas Abbey, also issued at 40%, also a white and in just about every way a superior product.  What could account for such a difference? Well, part of it is the lack of filtration, another is the source [Click here for the full review…]


Rhum Barbancourt Réserve Spéciale (1970s)

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Apr 102016
 
Rhum Barbancourt Réserve Spéciale (1970s)

Rumaniacs Review 021 | 0421 Here’s a pretty decent, if somewhat anorexic, rhum from Haiti, courtesy of the House of Barbancourt.  The name “Réserve Spéciale” is still in use, and refers these days to an eight year old, but so scarce is any kind of information on the sample I was provided (even getting a photo was problematic hence the lousy quality of the one you see here), that for me to say it was an eight year old back then is an educated guess, not a fact.  Still, info or no info, a sample was sent, and there it is and [Click here for the full review…]


The Real McCoy 3 Year Old White Rum – Review

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Apr 092016
 
The Real McCoy 3 Year Old White Rum - Review

Bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts will get more out of this than I ever will. It redefines the word “understated.” Knowing how I have never been entirely satisfied with rums from Barbados, I decided to buy a few about which many have waxed rhapsodic, followed that up with trying as many as I could at the 2015 Berlin rumfest, and continued on the theme by begging my friends in Europe for samples of their personal stocks of independent bottlers’ Bajans.  Let’s see if I can’t get to the bottom of why — with just a few exceptions — they don’t titillate [Click here for the full review…]


Rhum Rhum Libération 2012 Vieux Agricole “Integrale” – Review

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Mar 302016
 
Rhum Rhum Libération 2012 Vieux Agricole “Integrale” - Review

One of the best five year old rhums ever made, and a showcase for the wonderful directions the profile of a rhum can take. If I was underwhelmed by the “standard” 45% 2012 Liberation, and shrugged at the 2010 version (both rated around low eighties scores), let me assure you that the 2012 “Integrale”, bottled at a mouth watering 59.8%, is a beast of an entirely different colour. If your sojourn into agricoles ever takes you to Guadeloupe rhums, you could do a lot worse than stop a while at the small southern island of Marie Galante, where Bielle and [Click here for the full review…]


Neisson Rhum Agricole Vieux Tatanka “Le Coupeur” – Review

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Mar 242016
 
Neisson Rhum Agricole Vieux Tatanka "Le Coupeur" - Review

A youngish agricole with slightly loopy tastes that makes one intrigued enough to take another sip….and another two or three after that. Cheap tinfoil cap aside, this may truly be one of the most original and striking bottle labels I’ve ever seen.  Painted right on, colourful, bright, lovely, and if I was still scoring such things, it would be tempting to add an extra point or two just to show how much it appeals.  The bottle shape was the same as the Extra Vieux I wrote about some months back, but man, the design was as jazzed up as the [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Nation Demerara 1990 25 Year Old Rum – Review

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Mar 222016
 
Rum Nation Demerara 1990 25 Year Old Rum - Review

* The yin to Velier’s yang approaches its own pit stop on the road to the end of the Age of Demeraras, with a worthy entry to the genre. Because I have a thing for Demerara rums (and not just because I used to live in the neighborhood), I’m always interested in finding new ones…or old ones issued anew, take your pick.  The RN 1990 is a sad sort of milestone for the company, because it is one of the last of the deeply aged Demeraras the company will issue for some time, nearly depleting its stock of PM distillate [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Nation Peruano 8 Year Old Rum – Review

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Mar 162016
 
Rum Nation Peruano 8 Year Old Rum - Review

More tamed Peruvian sunshine. It’s been quite a few months since I picked up a Rum Nation product to write about.  This is not to say that they have either lapsed in sleep or are resting on the laurels of past achievements, since just the other day they put out some promo materials for two new Guadeloupe rums I’m going to keep an eye out for.  However, today I wanted to look at one of their other countries’ offerings, the Peruano 8 year old. Aficionados are no strangers to rums from that country: both the Millonario XO and Millonario 15 soleras [Click here for the full review…]


Appleton Estate “Extra” Jamaican Rum (1980s)

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Mar 152016
 
Appleton Estate "Extra" Jamaican Rum (1980s)

*** Rumaniacs Review 020 | 0420 The tinfoil cap and chubby, callypigian bottle (trust me, that’s a word worth knowing), give this away as a rum made within living memory, even if some of us weren’t drinking back then (or drinking much). The “Extra” evolved into the modern 12 year old…alas I didn’t have any on hand at the time I tried this ‘Maniacs sample so I couldn’t do a comparison, though some of my friends think it’s as good or better. It ain’ no quattie, I could tell you that. Colour – dark amber (darker than the current 12 year [Click here for the full review…]


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