Boozehound - Jason Wilson [78]
“So,” I said. “Is that your tasting note? This rum with an ‘h’ is grassy?” My friend extended me his middle finger.
I could empathize, and I felt for a moment like the dreaded Scotch snob pushing a big, smoky peat monster on a newbie (which I guess would go hand in hand with rum being the new single-malt Scotch). Anyway, rhum agricole may be the most complex rum of all. Only a handful of distilleries on Martinique and Guadeloupe are governed by an AOC, bestowed by the French government in 1996. Most other rums are made from molasses, but rhum agricole must be produced from 100 percent fresh, pure sugarcane juice. Some of the distilleries insist that their sugarcane be pressed within an hour of being cut in the fields. Rhum agricole is distilled at a lower proof than other rums to capture more of the natural qualities of the sugarcane. The result is that rhum agricole becomes another spirit that can actually claim terroir.
It’s an acquired taste, and honestly I didn’t get it at the outset. The white took some experimenting to learn to mix with, and I thought the aged versions seemed a little too grassy. Or vegetal. But soon enough I started to truly appreciate rhum agricole. Learning to love rhum agricole is really no different from learning to appreciate complex wines such as Barolo or Châteauneuf-du-Pape—and it’s infinitely easier than learning to love, say, Italian amari. So distinct is rhum agricole from other rums that the San Francisco World Spirits Competition recently instituted a separate category for the spirit.
“It’s like the difference between Scotch and bourbon,” said Ben Jones, a fourth-generation member of the Clément family who imports both Rhum Clément and Rhum J.M. from Martinique and has become rhum agricole’s biggest booster in the United States. “It’s just a different flavor profile.” Lower distilling temperatures make for a huge contrast with molasses-based rums. “Once you cook the sugar, you’ve cooked off all the terroir and the finer qualities of what the sugarcane has to offer,” Jones said.
After finally wrapping his mind around rhum agricole—extra “h” and all—even my friend had to agree.
There is at least one “h” rhum, however, that is not AOC controlled: Rhum Barbancourt from Haiti. And every time I see the fifteen-year-old bottle sitting on a liquor store shelf in the States for $44, it makes me sad and conflicted. I usually buy it, out of a sense of pity and remorse. Probably no one can taste Haitian rum and not think of the devastation and human tragedy of the earthquake in January 2010.
For me, it runs deeper. I can’t ever taste it without thinking of my own visit to Haiti, back in 1999. I was visiting along with two friends, Kevin and Míchel. We’d all been greeted by the creaky brass band on the tarmac at the airport, and then by the construction sign at customs that read, “We Are Sorry To Welcome You In This Condition.” We loved that bottles of Barbancourt cost only eight dollars. And we found it intriguing that everyone sitting beside us at the blood-red blackjack table in the El Rancho Casino in Pétionville was a “businessman” from Colombia with bodyguards. But our first evening eventually turned squirrelly when Míchel won eight hundred dollars in a slot machine and then was told by the cashier he’d be paid not in dollars or gourdes, but in something called “Haitian dollars”—a nebulous denomination that amounted to less than one hundred dollars. When he started to protest a little too loudly and drunkenly, several guys with machine guns came over and escorted him out. As I followed, a faded pink five-dollar chip fell out of my pocket, and a teenage prostitute dove to the carpet in front of me to grab it.
The next day, as we puttered along in the bumper-to-bumper Port-au-Prince traffic, rolling over occasional streams of raw sewage, Saintil, our driver, explained to us that his favorite actor was Shaquille O’Neal. He particularly liked Shaq in the movie Steel. Saintil