On Wine: Exotic rhum a relative sugar baby

Published January 10, 2007 at midnight

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My latest passion is a thing called rhum. It's often beautifully packaged in exotic bottles wrapped in raffia or leather and stopped with glass or cork. Like Barbie, it comes with a host of accessories: flasks of pure cane syrup, perhaps, or gadgets for squeezing limes.

But beyond the cachet and the H, is rhum truly a different beast from plain old rum? To find out, I set off on a course of research armed only with hot butter, a coconut shell and a thousand tiny parasols.

The story starts with the sugar cane plant, a Papua, New Guinea, native that worked its way through Asia, Africa, India and Spain before landing with Columbus on his second trip to the West Indies in 1493.

Sugar, at first, was not a cash cow. The refining process was complex; it involved separating rough grains from the industrial waste known as molasses, usually dumped in the sea. Then one day someone noticed this sludge spontaneously fermenting. A priest in Martinique named Père Labat jumped on the opportunity to distill even this sludgy brown wine, and so invented rum.

The islands were carpeted in the 1600s with sugar plantations, most doubling as distilleries. A century later the trade triangle of molasses to rum to slaves had made colonial America the biggest rum producer. Yankees lapped it up until 1774, when Britain's Parliament slapped them with the Molasses Act, which raised taxes on treacle while prohibiting its import from non-British isles. Faced with the loss of their U.S. market, French Caribbean planters allied with New England to help win the revolution.

However, no sooner was the war won then newly minted Americans turned their attention to home- grown products, namely whiskey. Caribbean rum survived, thanks to a European rum-punch fad and an exclusive contract with the unquenchable British Royal Navy.

One of those stalwarts was Admiral Nelson, whose body was shipped home from Trafalgar in a vat of rum. The story goes that thirsty seamen, not fussy about decomposing-officer funk, sipped around him through macaroni straws, giving rise to the expression "tapping the admiral." In 1895, malaria sent Prince Henry of Battenberg home from Africa in the same pickled fashion.

Rum didn't catch on again in the States till after Prohibition, chiefly when World War II restricted the cognac and scotch supply. Glamour days followed, as playboys at the Tropicana and Nacional hotels of pre-commie Cuba sipped Cuba librés, mojitos and mai tais poolside. Generations of young women would rely on rum and diet Coke to make them simultaneously skinny, sober and drunk.

Cocktails usually are made with white rum, bottled shortly after distilling. Darker rums get their oomph from small oak barrels.

Then there's sipping rum, quickly edging into the province of single malts and cognac. Though this kind of rum is not built in a day, exactly how long it ages is a tricky question.

The Caribbean heat evaporates up to 15 percent of a barrel a year. Twelve years might leave less than five gallons in a 52-gallon barrel. So 24-year-old rums are as suspicious as they are delicious.

But they still ain't rhum. Ninety-five percent of the world's production is distilled from fermented molasses. When beet sugar began threatening the cane market in the 19th century, Martinique producer Homère Clément had the idea to squeeze fresh cane and ferment the juice as if it was wine before distilling. That's what became known as rhum agricole, as opposed to industriale - the molasses kind. It costs more, since it uses the whole crop and can be made only during the few weeks of harvest.

Rhum isn't so much better than rum as different. Like some high-price wines, it can be quirky. Along with the usual buttery caramel flavors come complex grassy, vegetal notes and mysterious reminders of rocks and rain.

Recommended

Rhum

• Água Luca - Brazil

• 10 Cane - Trinidad

• Rhum Clément - Martinique

• Rhum JM - Martinique

• Barbancourt - Haiti

• Neissen - Martinique

• Depaz - Martinique

• Oronoco - Brazil

• La Favorite - Martinique

Rum