Boozehound - Jason Wilson [77]
Annual sales of premium rum are up about 40 percent since 2002, and I’ve come to think of rum as one of the most complicated and fascinating spirits in the liquor store. Still, a rum tasting is quite different from a wine tasting. What is a rum tasting like? Let me quickly dispense with a few of your more pressing questions:
No, neither Captain Morgan Spiced Rum nor Malibu coconut rum is served.
Yes, there may be a $279 aged rum on offer.
No, there is never a frozen daiquiri nor a blueberry mojito nor a Bahama Mama to be found.
No, no one described anything as “grassy” or “fruit forward” or “mature yet owns the promise of youthfulness.”
Yes, I’ve seen several young women drawing smiley faces on their tasting sheets to mark the rums they liked and frowny faces to mark the ones they didn’t.
Yes, I overheard someone ask, “So, Guatemala … that’s where, Central America, right?”
Yes, there are numerous middle-aged men wearing Jimmy Buffet–esque island-print shirts, including one shirt I saw with pictures of bongos.
No, there is not a lot of spitting going on.
All of which makes for a much more fun event than most other tastings I attend. Rum is, of course, a sugarcane-based spirit, but it has many variations. Some (say, from the English-speaking islands) are darker and fuller and use more molasses, while some (say, from the Spanish-speaking nations) are lighter and use less molasses. Some, made purely with sugarcane juice (say, from the French-speaking islands) use no molasses. Then there are varying amounts of barrel aging. The quality and complexity of rums overall has improved dramatically since the days of Hemingway: some of them have a fiery, smoky finish; others display more rounded hints of vanilla or caramel. The range is diverse.
With so many nations represented in the room—from Venezuela to Haiti to Martinique to Barbados—there are bound to be some regional rivalries. Once, I chatted near the hors d’oeuvres table with an international couple, the wife from Trinidad and the husband from Guyana. “Have you tried some of our rums from Trinidad yet?” asked the woman, insisting I get myself a taste of 10 Cane rum.
I asked her husband what he’d tasted. “Well, since I’m from Guyana,” he said, “I’ve been tasting mostly the rums from Guyana.” At my enthusiastic prodding, he sampled one of the Guatemalan rums and told me, with a shrug, that he was unimpressed. I then moved over to one of the stars of the evening, from Guyana: a seventeen-year-old rum, aged in Syrah casks, produced by Murray McDavid ($89). I noticed that the people with whom I tasted the Murray McDavid drifted back to that table several times during the evening. I could see why the guy from Guyana had been so smug.
I’m always amazed at how expensive rum has gotten over the past decade: Zacapa 23 from Guatemala ($41), Mount Gay Extra Old from Barbados ($42), and the Santa Teresa Antiguo de Solera from Venezuela ($37) are just a few examples. Of course, the Cask 1623 rum produced by Pyrat, with its outlandish $279 price tag, was … nice? (And by “nice” I mean “not worth the money.”) I began looking around for bottles that might convince a rum newbie or skeptic that the spirit is sophisticated and versatile. I found several outstanding aged rums for less than $30. You cannot go wrong with any of these: Pampero Aniversario Añejo from Venezuela at $29; Mount Gay Eclipse from Barbados at $27; and my old friend, seven-year-old Flor de Caña Grand Reserve at $24.
“Is aged rum the new single-malt Scotch?” my editor once asked. Hmm … perhaps? I find myself turning much more often to rums, served neat or on the rocks, than I do to other high-end sprits. A similar tasting challenge is there. Sometimes it takes a little time to wrap one’s mind around a spirit. Take, for instance, rhum agricole from Martinique.
“Since when do you spell rum with an ‘h’?” a friend asked when I served him a tasting flight of rhum agricole.
“It’s French,” I explained.
“Figures.”