Vagabond Spirits

In my case it came naturally, step by step. I worked for 11 years in my family's spirit shop, with a collection of more than 300 rums. One day I realised that only a handful of them were actually really interesting to me, and that is when I decided I would be doing my own rums.

I am a DIY type of guy. I started a collaboration with Guillaume Ferroni for the Off-Road batch #1, then I continued with batch #2, and after a year and a half I got to the point where I had the casks to develop the brand further.

It is not that complicated. I think I have the trust of the fans. I also release fewer bottlings now. The point is to release something good at the right price.

It lets you bring the price down. It is a question of profitability. I still use the 70cl format for the permanent range. Bottling at 50cl is not more complicated, but it is definitely more work.

Given the current context, I think that in France it will get harder to sell bottles over the next two years.

I am a huge fan of Savanna. If I had to name others, I would say Madilao, Long Pond, Gray's and Bielle.

I cannot tell you which of my own bottlings is my favourite. I consider all of them my children. I cannot choose one over another.

I got it through my cooper. She is an incredible person, she managed to get us this cask of Jurançon vendanges tardives, a late harvest from Domaine Lajibe, which is a highly prestigious wine.

Wine casks are quite challenging to work with. You have to move fast, otherwise the wine turns into vinegar and the cask cannot be used.

RumX note: batch #1 is no longer in the catalogue. The current release in that line is Bonne Mère Butterfly Batch 2, a Bonne Mère from Guadeloupe.

It depends. Sometimes I get around 20 samples to choose one cask, sometimes it is fast and efficient, but it can also be long and complicated.

Sometimes you go to a broker and you try casks until you narrow down what you are looking for, but you only have a limited amount of time to do it.

If you feel the product is ready, you can bottle it. But I think the added value of an independent bottler is to add their own touch to the product, and that comes with resting time, blending, finishes and so on.

We are very dependent on brokers. Some people like Luca Gargano have their own contacts with the distilleries, but few distilleries sell their casks directly to independent bottlers.

The transparency on casks is not always crystal clear. Sometimes a cask moves around a lot before it is sold to an independent bottler. The time it spends in tropical aging and then in continental aging is not always tracked properly, and sometimes there are even gaps in the history of the cask and you do not know where it has been. You need to conduct your own investigation when you get a cask.

There are several scenarios. It can be a trend: a bottler releases something from a specific vintage, it works, so others follow with their own bottling.

Sometimes a broker decides to release a lot of casks from the same vintage at the same time. And sometimes a barrel is expensive, a Caroni cask for instance, and two or more bottlers decide to split the cost and buy it together.

I tell a story first and foremost. The point is to sell something that has a meaning, a story, not just a bottle that can be summed up as a set of stats.

It all depends where you are buying your bottles. Rum as a raw product has not seen its price increase much at the distillery level.

No limit. As long as I find it interesting, and legal, I go for it.

I get the idea, I think about how to actually make it real, and I do it. One of the limits can be getting the administrative authorisation, in the case of some extreme aging experiments in peculiar places.

It can happen. Rum has a higher margin for error than whisky, for instance, but it has happened. On the Off-Road underwater experiment part of the batch at 47% was overly salty and could not be bottled. I kept it aside for other experiments.

There is a financial risk, but a mistake can be fixed. The feeling of having failed at something is what hurts the most.

Many more mischiefs!