Rare Flavors

A Best of France Selection

Whether it’s white or brown, rum is distilled from sugar cane. But there’s rum and then there’s Martinique rum. The very special rum made in Martinique, a Caribbean island in the Lesser Antilles and a full-fledged French département, has been granted an AOC designation. Known as agricole, or agricultural rum (as opposed to industrial rum, which is made differently), it has precise requirements in terms of plantation locations, planting methods and sugar cane varieties. The rum is distilled directly from the juice of the sugar cane, called vesou, and not the mélasse, or cane residue used to make sugar, which is used for all other rums except those made in the French Antilles. And that makes all the difference. The cane, cut into sections and ground, produces the famous vesou, which is first fermented, then distilled. It leaves the copper distillation column with a 70 percent alcohol content. Stored for a minimum of three months and stirred to oxygenate the liquid, it can be bottled, once its alcohol content has been reduced by further distillation or by the addition of spring water, as white rum. Its powerful flavor means it can be drunk straight or as Ti Punch, made with a zest of lime and several drops of sugar syrup, and served without ice. It is also used as a fragrant base for exotic fruit cocktails.

Rum aged in wood, or rhum paille (straw), a clear gold in color, spends a minimum of 12 months in oak casks holding well over 6,000 gallons. As for rhum vieux, it’s aged for at least three years and often much longer, partly in new oak barrels and partly in barrels that previously contained bourbon. Each cellar master has his own secrets and blends his rum to give it a unique character-extremely important since most of these aged rums are not mixed in cocktails but drunk as digestifs. Everything plays an important part in this process: the size and age of the barrel, its amount of interior charring, and the place where the rum is aged, from north to south on the island, with its varying humidity-particularly important at this latitude where tannins develop quickly. Rum lovers do not hesitate to spend as much for an aged rum as they would for a great cognac or a single malt Scotch. And beware: once you taste it, you may find you’re not able to do without it.

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Originally published in the December 2008 issue of France Today. Updated in July 2013.