Boozehound - Jason Wilson [81]
As we ordered more rum, Kevin innocently requested a once-popular song he only half remembered from when he’d honeymooned in Haiti in the late 1970s. But when the band suddenly broke into the chorus of “Duvalier, Duvalier,” nearly half the bar cleared out. The only one still dancing was a prostitute in a dirty brown dress. A dozen boys who loitered in the street kept tapping us on the shoulder, over the patio railing, with their palms out.
Our twelve-year-old guide returned. Míchel told him to get lost, but Kevin had another idea. This boy was barefoot, and for a couple days we’d all noticed how raw and injured his feet looked. Kevin took out four twenty-dollar bills, gave the boy one of them, and told him to go buy a pair of shoes with the money. “If you come back tomorrow at breakfast wearing a new pair of shoes,” he said, “I’ll give you the rest of the money.”
The next morning, over mangoes and coffee on the hotel patio, we saw the boy clomping across the square. He was wearing a brand-new pair of what must have been size-thirteen basketball shoes. He could barely walk in them without tripping, and at one point he walked right out of them. But he was beaming, and he stomped up onto the patio and toward our table. He tapped Kevin on the shoulder and put his hand out. Kevin counted the bills into his hand.
When we returned to Pétionville, we attempted to visit the Barbancourt distillery. Saintil drove us, in the morning sunshine, high above Port-au-Prince to the stone ramparts of the Jane Barbancourt Castle. The thick, wooden door was locked, and so we banged with the huge metal knocker. After three knocks, the castle door slowly opened, and we were met by … a woman in pink curlers and a nightgown. “You want to taste rum?” she said. There was a flurry of activity, and the woman’s clearly hungover (or strung-out) boyfriend served us a huge plate of mangoes and coffee while the woman searched the castle for the key to the tasting room. She handed us a brochure that had to have dated from the Duvalier-era 1960s—with oversaturated photos of lush green mountains that now were totally deforested. The tasting room looked like a cheesy midcentury version of Medieval Times, with chairs and a bar cut out of barrels. The couple dusted off a few ancient bottles of Jane Barbancourt rum—not at all what we’d been drinking. Of course, this visit had been a big mistake. We later learned that there are two branches of the Barbancourt family that split many years ago. Some got the distillery, while others got the castle.
After I returned home from Haiti, I tacked a quote above my desk that has hung there for over a decade. It’s from the seventeenth-century English churchman Thomas Fuller: “If an ass goes traveling, he’ll not come home a horse.”
Lately, I’ve been drinking Rhum Barbancourt again, because I think it’s important to remember that some spirits, particularly rum, often come from troubled places. If we think about the terroir of spirits, we should also think about the people who struggle in that terroir. The Barbancourt distillery suffered major damage, losing around four million dollars in the January 2010 earthquake. But within six months, I was glad to hear that the distillery, with its 250 workers, is back up and running—optimistically hoping to recoup its loses within a few years. As for the Jane Barbancourt castle, I have heard nothing.
Years after I visited Haiti, I was tasting with a young Calvados producer from Normandy named Guillaume Drouin, who told me he’d worked for two years at the real Barbancourt distillery before he took over his father’s Calvados distillery. Drouin was then an oenologist and he followed his girlfriend to Haiti. “The