Berry Bros & Rudd

Berry Bros. & Rudd is a London wine and spirits merchant that has traded from No.3 St James's Street since 1698 and is still owned and run by the Berry and Rudd families. The shop opened when a widow known as the Widow Bourne started an Italian grocer's there, selling tea, snuff, spices and coffee, and the coffee-mill sign still hangs outside the premises today. As the business moved into wine and then spirits, Berry Bros. & Rudd began bottling casks under its own label in the early 19th century, which is why the house describes itself as Britain's oldest independent spirits bottler.

It was also the first wine and spirits merchant to launch online, back in 1994. The history has its colourful chapters too: the firm supplied smugglers running alcohol into Prohibition-era America and once sheltered Napoleon III in the cellars beneath the shop.

The Classic Range is the entry-level line, built so each bottling is a clear standard-bearer for its origin, all sitting around 40.5% ABV. Curated by Felix Dear, it currently spans four origins: the Barbados Classic Range Barbados, the Classic Range Guatemala, a Classic Range Jamaica with the island's typical fruit and funk, and a softer Classic Range Nicaragua. It is the easiest way to taste how one bottler reads four very different rum countries.

For cask-strength bottlings from named distilleries, often sought-after or closed ones, each a single-cask release in limited volume. From Foursquare in Barbados, run by the Seale family, comes a column-and-pot blend like this Foursquare 2010. From the long-closed Caroni distillery in Trinidad, demolished in 2002, come the heavy, tar-and-tropical bottlings collectors chase, such as this Caroni 1997. And from Guyana's Demerara stills come spirit-led rums like the Versailles 1985, distilled on a wooden pot still. New single casks join the line-up regularly, so the live catalog above is the place to check what is in stock.

No. Berry Bros. & Rudd is an independent bottler: it selects casks from distilleries across the Caribbean and Central America and bottles them under its own label. Each release is meant to stand on its own as an expression of a place, a year or a still.

Felix Dear, Berry Bros. & Rudd's Spirits Curator, selects the casks one by one. He came to spirits through whisky, from a childhood near Scotland's Royal Lochnagar distillery to hosting tastings at Speyside's Highlander Inn and the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in London, then buying world-whisky casks at Atom before joining Berry Bros. & Rudd. That single-palate, named-curator approach is why the range hangs together rather than reading like a random parcel of casks.