Distilling Rum Culture in Barbados, Jamaica and Martinique

I briefly explore the carefully restored home, which is all dense, dark woodwork with formal dining room laid out as if for an impending feast. Then I wander down to visit the new rum–making operation, in an outbuilding near the stone base of an 18th–century windmill. Deeds suggest that rum was made here as early as 1658, although it’s uncertain when that stopped.

I meet owner Larry Warren, an affable man with a greying ponytail and an accent that brings to mind Newfoundland. An architect by trade, he comes from a family that has lived on Barbados since the 1840s. After purchasing the estate in 2006, Warren opened it up to tours, added a small café and began making rum with molasses produced from the estate’s sugar cane – unique amongst this island’s other producers, who source their syrup offshore. (He also uses yeasts cultured in Speyside, Scotland.) It’s the first new distillery in 20 years, and second in a century, on an island that has seen more than 80 through the ages.

His hybrid pot–and–column still is coppery and steampunk–ish, laden with dials and gauges, and it sits in a room with oak barrels stacked five high. The wood and West Indian heat perform their subtle magic on rum, which ages three years before seeing a bottle. The rum also evaporates through the wood in the island heat. Warren scrambles up a ladder and pops a bung to let me taste some of his first run, and is chagrined to find it empty – it’s been sampled too often.

We find liquid luck in the distillery’s tasting room, where I try his rich and supple white rum. Birds clamour in the trees off the deck, and a familiar aroma wafts through: fermenting molasses. A by–product of sugar production, it’s the raw material for most rums around the world, as it was when Barbados was dotted with distilleries. Shortly after Warren opened, one old–time islander visited, inhaled deeply and exclaimed, “Brudder, haven’t smelled that in 40 years!”

That same scent fills the air around the Mount Gay distillery at the north end of the island, where I’m met by spokesman Darrio Prescod, who agreed to show me around. (The distillery is not normally open to the public.) Mount Gay claims, with solid evidence, to be the oldest continuous producer of rum in the world. As we trek off to see the pot and column stills, Prescod fills me in on how the island’s coral limestone bedrock filters minerals out of the water, making it every bit as perfect for distilling as the famous branch water of Kentucky. “It’s safe to say that this island was invented for rum,” he says with a wry grin.

And for enjoying it, too. My best Barbados rum moment happens at John Moore Bar in Weston, on the east coast. It’s something of a glorified shack, wedged between a busy two–lane road and a lovely white–sand beach fringed with sea almond trees. A local crew loudly celebrates a birthday at picnic tables outside (they toast me and I toast them), and I spend a short afternoon working through a set–up – a bottle of Mount Gay rum, and some cola and ice. I sip as I watch fishermen bobbing in lurid green, pink and blue boats harvesting “sea eggs” from urchins offshore: a scene as timeless as Barbados rum.

As I criss–cross Jamaica a few days later I pass dozens of small, marginally derelict rum shops, like in Barbados, but with better names: Rumfaces Bar, Denise’s Bar & Car Wash. When I slow down to sip the rum, though, I know where I am. Jamaica’s traditional approach – longer fermentation times and a preference for dense, pot–distilled rum in their blends – makes the local spirit deep and earthy with a full, robust taste, at times reminiscent of overripe pineapple.

My first stop is at Appleton Estate – the source of Jamaica’s best–known export (after Bob Marley tunes) – deep inside St. Elizabeth Parish. The last leg of the drive is like a prelude, taking me through endless, dense sugar cane fields. Appleton’s factory complex has the feel of a small, self–contained, if overlooked, village, complete with free–roaming peacocks wandering between trees with whitewashed trunks and rum barrels with whitewashed heads.

Joy Spence, Appleton’s long–time master blender, has combined sharp sensory skills with training in chemistry to ensure that all rum bottled here is faithful to Appleton’s famed flavour profile, balancing funk with elegance. She shows me around the grounds, including a historic mule–powered sugar cane press and the massive shed–like building where the modern rum–making is under way.

After a tasting of five Appleton rums, several bottles are set before me and I’m told to craft my own blend, mixing the plummy, custardy notes of aged pot–still rum with the bright, lemony zest of the younger column–stilled rum. I pour, taste and tinker. Voilà! I think my smooth, understated blend quite tasty. Joy Spence does not.

The drinks are always better when tracked down and consumed in the roadside dives and seaside shacks that dot the island. At Scotchies in Montego Bay, the jerk pork, served with a fiery pepper sauce that’s not for the timid, was tamed by a rum and Ting (a local grapefruit soda). And Floyd’s Pelican Bar, a reverse oasis in Parottee Bay on the island’s south coast, is essentially a slapdash assemblage of stilts, driftwood planks and thatch set on a swamped sandbar far from land. In other words, the perfect place to savour the richness of Jamaican rum – and chase it with Red Stripe.

I head away from the waves back into Jamaica’s hilly, forested landscape to Hampden Estate, about 45 minutes from Montego Bay. This sugar estate, founded in 1753, has a Gothic–influenced plantation house still used by the family that owns the distillery. The distiller here has the splendidly Dickensian name of Vivian Wisdom, which makes him the perfect guide for showing me around a place that evidently hasn’t seen much modernization since Charles Dickens.

We spend a bit of time exploring the rum works, a marvel of 19th–century technology with stone walls and abundant spiders and a roof sorely in need of patching. “It’s not a sterile distillery,” says Wisdom, “let me put it that way.” As he explains it, rum making here still requires knowledge of how it was done in decades past, which involves indigenous yeasts and microbes that live in the rafters above and silently colonize the vats during fermentation. They’ve never modernized because customers want the rum to taste just as it does.

After, we walk over to the porch–wrapped plantation house and stroll the veranda, sipping some of their fruity, high–ester rum. It’s bold and complex – who needs modern? – and it tastes to me of right here and now.

The majority of rum worldwide starts as molasses, a by–product of sugar production. On Martinique, they make rum (or rhum, as it’s spelled here) from fresh–pressed sugar cane juice – and have done since the collapse of the 19th century sugar industry left a surplus of fresh cane. It’s called “agricole” rum, and when I sip it (especially the unaged white rum), it seems appropriately named – all grassy and agricultural. I know in an instant that this is a product that came from a field. It’s distinctive enough to have its own appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC), like Armagnac or Roquefort or Chablis.

The Distillerie Saint–James is a large, industrial outfit producing some fine agricole rums from one of the AOC cane–growing zones in the township of Sainte–Marie. I spend a couple of hours poking around the Musée du Rhum, two buildings chock full of rum history – the old plantation house overflows with colourful French posters and marketing memorabilia of the last century. There’s also an old sugar cane train repurposed to take passengers on a trip to a banana museum (lamentably, not in operation that day), and I find what amounts to a festival of hammered copper: a soaring, two–storey building filled with an enthralling – for a distilling geek like me – collection of a couple dozen ancient stills rescued from the weeds around the island.

When I break for food, it’s a reminder that I’m in an overseas region of France. Over the course of a few days, I enjoy many fine meals, including Creole–style grilled fish for lunch at a casual beachfront shack with views toward distant Dominica, and a supper of seafood cassoulet and mango tarte tatin in a quiet second–floor Creole–French restaurant called the Yellow. The evening is suddenly made less quiet when 11 finalists in the upcoming Miss Martinique contest arrive to celebrate a birthday – and the clamour quickly goes from bug to feature.

Getting out of the city, I spend most of a day hiking Mount Pelée, the island’s volcano, which towers above the sea. I’m assured it’s dormant (it last blew in 1932), but in 1902 it erupted and almost instantly killed 30,000 people. My path is long and relentless, first ascending to the rim of a caldera, then plunging down into a ravine before climbing the steep volcanic cones to the chilly, 1,937–metre summit – a six–hour round trip with fog drifting by in huge, silent tufts.

From the volcano I can almost see the whole of the island, and I look down the slopes to my favourite rum producer on Martinique – and possibly in all of the West Indies – Distillerie J.M, in the hills of Macouba, near the island’s northern tip. It’s a Shangri–La–like setting with the distillery just above a small pond, and lush forest and verdant slopes in the background.

It’s a busy day when I arrive – a new boiler is being delivered, and one of the towering copper column stills is being reassembled after repairs – but long–time distiller Nazaire Canatous takes a few minutes to greet me. Gesturing to the hills, he explains how the cane is grown on the volcano’s flanks, with harvesters bringing in only as much each day as can be crushed before dusk. After 24 hours of fermentation, the wash is sent through the column stills, then rested or aged before finding its way into bottles.

The place appeals to me in part because it so seamlessly melds yesterday and today. Canatous has worked here for nearly four decades; he’s the son of the former distiller, who began in 1930. Yet it also has a spiffy new olfactory room to educate vis–itors, where I sample the component aromas (warm Martinique vanilla, fragrant white flower) in the nine different rums produced here. Perhaps not surprisingly, this makes me thirsty.

Before departing, I select a bottle of the delicious, complicated X.O. I know that when I get home, uncorking it will release the north–facing slopes of a volcano and morning sunlight and the sounds of a sugar mill noisily making its way through an afternoon’s harvest.

In short, I hold in my hand Martinique, neatly embottled.