By BAZ DREISINGERFEB. 21, 2014
“Care to kiss the ground?”
The question came, with a slightly patronizing grin, from Norman Murray, local sage and tour guide in the rural parish of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica.
“Our visitors from Europe, America — this is a holy pilgrimage for them. So, really,” he egged me on, “feel free.”
Confession: I nearly knelt. After years of visiting Jamaica, I had at last landed in Appleton Estate, a centuries-old temple of sorts, teeming with spirits and nestled in the lush Nassau Valley.
I composed myself, and resumed the tour, moving from fermentation to distillation to tongue-titillation — a.k.a. tasting — under Mr. Murray’s erudite command. I learned how rum was born in the 17th century, when industrial waste — molasses residue from slave-era sugar production — was transformed via yeast into drinkable stuff, marketable especially in New England, where the “spirit of ‘76” so saturated American culture that George Washington demanded it at his inauguration. I also sampled molasses, met a donkey that demonstrated old-time methods for crushing cane, discovered how rum gets flavor and color (wood-barrel aging) and recorded factors affecting the final product (soil, climate, variety of cane, strain of yeast). I heard of Joy Spence, one of the rum world’s only female master blenders (“She’s all ours!” Mr. Murray affirmed). And thus this ardent rum fan did not divert from her sober — er, sometimes sober — mission: travel the Caribbean, steered by rum.
Call it rumming around: traversing three islands via the inebriating stuff — the oil of the colonial era — that, for centuries, lubricated economies and fueled bloody deeds. This string of islands may chat in disparate tongues and dance to divergent soundtracks, but one heady draft remains its common denominator: brown or white, served neat in roadside watering holes or garnished with cherries and umbrellas in tourist spots, rum yokes the region historically, culturally, intoxicatingly.
It’s also on the rise. Much as vodka did a decade ago, rum is enjoying a resurgence, with brands emerging from Connecticut to St. Croix, Australia to Trinidad. Never mind food and wine; food and rum festivals are the way to go, in destinations like Barbados, Grenada, Berlin and Rome. The International Rum Council, an online community featuring awards, chat rooms and a visual “museum,” offers rum-themed cruises; there’s even a global National Rum Day, Aug. 16. Ah, liquor gentrification: an erstwhile low-class swill putatively named for “rumbullion,” meaning “great tumult,” nicknamed “kill-devil,” and described by a colonial visitor to the West Indies as “a hot, hellish and terrible liquor,” has turned trendy. All of which makes it the ideal chaperone through the Caribbean’s many faces: humble and haute, past and present…
