Rumpundit

Where rum needs no umbrella

Canwest News Service

We’re in the old stone tasting room at historic St. Nicholas Abbey on Barbados, surrounded by copper-pot stills and oak barrels and the nose- ticklingly spicy aroma of the aged rum in our glasses.

Outside, the warm Caribbean breeze rustles through acres of sugar cane that one day will end up in a glass just like this. Because what we’re tasting today isn’t just a luscious award-winning rum, but the distillation of 350 years of Caribbean tradition and, if all goes according to plan, the spirit of the islands’ future.

“We are really providing an authentic product,” says Larry Warren, owner of St. Nicholas Abbey. “It’s the truest single-cask rum in the world.”

When Warren bought the Jacobean manor a few years ago, it was on the verge of being turned into condos. Now, not only has the Bajan architect refurbished the home to its 17th-century grandeur, but he has also revived the old sugar plantation. He plans to work it the way it was done before modern mechanization – and that includes making rum from sugar canes harvested on his own land, then juiced, fermented, pot-stilled and aged. It will take a few years to become self-sufficient, of course, so until then St. Nicholas Abbey 10-year-old rum is being produced with the help of the highly regarded Foursquare Distillery.

“We’re trying to make it a sustainable business,” Warren says. “These products will ultimately sustain the lands. The sugar cane will sustain the lands.”

The cane will sustain a new type of tourism, too, attracting the sort of visitor who travels with tasting glass in hand.

Throughout the Caribbean, rum distilleries are flinging open their doors, inviting guests in for tastings of the beverage that has been so famously enjoyed by pirates, partying college kids and, more recently, discerning mixologists.

Unlike, say, cognac, rum has gotten little respect in the past, perhaps because it was so often used in fruity drinks garnished with paper umbrellas. That’s changing, thanks to a handful of Caribbean distilleries that are creating handcrafted spirits that appeal to sophisticated palates.

Barbados, considered the birthplace of rum, is the epicentre of this movement. In addition to St. Nicholas Abbey and Foursquare, there’s Mount Gilboa, the island’s oldest distillery, which produces a pot-stilled rum that has connoisseurs swooning, and Mount Gay, the most prestigious of the island’s big distilleries, which has begun work on its own pot-stilled rum. As Mount Gay’s master blender Allen Smith notes, “There’s a lot of interest in the complexity of these rums.”

But it’s not just Barbados that’s seeing a renaissance of great grog. There’s also Antigua’s English Harbour pot-stilled and oak-aged rums, the Dominican Republic’s prized Ron Barcelo and Bruguel Extra Viejo, Guyana’s El Dorado 15-year-old rums and Rhum Barbancourt, Haiti’s “rum agricole” made from sugar-cane juice instead of molasses.

Today, almost every one of the islands offers some sort of special rum, an amber elixir of spice and fruit and caramel that distills the very essence of the Caribbean.

– For more information, visit the Barbados Tourism Authority at visitbarbados.org, stnicholasabbey.com and, for more on Caribbean rum, the very helpful Authentic Caribbean Rum site at truerum.com.