Buy Planteray

Yes: Planteray is the new name for Plantation, and only the name changed. Maison Ferrand renamed the whole range in 2024, and the rums, the distilleries and the blends behind them stayed the same, so a bottle that says Plantation and one that says Planteray contain the same rum. Why the old name had to go, Alexandre Gabriel explained in our interview.

You will see both labels for a while, because the rename has not worked through the whole range yet and old stock is still selling through. Several well-known bottles still carry the Plantation label and are listed under that name in our database, among them the O.F.T.D. Overproof, the Stiggins' Fancy Pineapple, the dry XAYMACA Special Dry, the 3 Stars White and the Grande Reserve. On RumX both names live on this page: a bottle keeps the name on its label but belongs to the same brand.

Planteray runs from the flagship Planteray XO 20th Anniversary, a soft, polished Barbados blend, through Cut & Dry and the multi-origin Sealander to high-ester rums and rare single casks, next to a familiar line of pineapple, overproof and white rums for cocktails. The XO is the bottle most people mean by Planteray. Its "20th Anniversary" marks Alexandre Gabriel's 20th year as master blender, not the age of the rum: by the house's data sheet, the rums spend 8 to 15 years in the Caribbean before their time in France. Cut & Dry uses a whole Barbados coconut per litre. At the serious end sit the Hogo Monsters, Maison Ferrand's in-house name for super high-ester rums like the Hogo Monster, alongside rare single casks such as the 40-year Clarendon Jamaica MMW 1984. Start with the XO, and if you want it dry and intense from the start, skip the core blends and go straight to a Hogo Monster or a single cask.

Planteray is distilled in the Caribbean and beyond, then finished in France, and its centre of gravity is Barbados and the West Indies Rum Distillery, founded in 1893 and owned by Maison Ferrand since 2017. It supplies the largest share of the range, including the flagship, the Cut and Dry and the high-ester Barbados releases.

Beyond that, Planteray buys and blends from a whole set of houses. Jamaica brings Clarendon and Long Pond, which carry the funky, ester-driven end of the portfolio. Trinidad contributes lighter column distillates through T.D.L., and Fiji comes in via Fiji Rum and Co. If you want to feel how far apart those origins taste, put a Barbados bottling next to a Jamaican one.

Double ageing means the rum matures twice, in two climates: first in the Caribbean, then in France, and almost everything at Planteray runs through it. Phase one happens at origin: the rum rests in ex-bourbon casks, in heat and high humidity. The wood gives fast, producing vanilla, caramel and tropical fruit.

Phase two takes place in France, in small ex-cognac casks at Maison Ferrand in the Charente. It is cool there, maturation slows, and instead of more raw wood the rum picks up finer notes: spice, dried fruit, a softness that reads as cognac. That second phase is exactly why a Planteray tastes rounder and more polished than a purely tropically aged rum from the same distillery. Limited releases sometimes add a third cask on top, such as Pedro Ximenez or a whisky cask.

Many of the core blends do: they carry a light dosage, a small addition of sugar in the Ferrand house style that is part of their rounded character, while the limited single casks and festival releases almost never do. For the XO 20th Anniversary, Maison Ferrand's own data sheet gives a dosage of 19 grams per litre (October 2026). Sweetness is where opinions on Planteray split, and it is the point where RumX has its own measurements: our database records per bottling whether sugar was detected.

The table sets that measurement next to the community rating for six bottlings, as of August 2026. The undosed ones tend to sit higher, but not as a rule, as the undosed O.F.T.D. Overproof shows, built at 69 percent as a cocktail rum. If you want to drink Planteray neat and avoid the sweetness, go looking for the undosed bottlings, the same ones we collect on our unsweetened rum page.

Sip the XO 20th Anniversary neat or over one large cube, mix the pineapple, overproof and white rums into cocktails, and keep the high-ester Hogo Monsters and the single casks for sipping neat from a tulip glass. The XO's rounded, lightly sweet profile also makes a fine rum old fashioned. The pineapple (Stiggins' Fancy), the overproof OFTD and the white rums carry anything from a daiquiri to a tiki long drink, and Cut & Dry is the easy pick for a pina colada. In the tulip glass the high-ester and single-cask bottlings get room to show their intensity and fruit, so save them for when you want to taste what Planteray can do at full volume.

Choose Planteray for the more refined, lightly sweet pour and Diplomatico for the richer, sweeter one: both are rounded, accessible sipping rums. The Planteray XO leans on its cognac-cask finish for a drier, more polished, slightly oaky profile, while Diplomatico Reserva Exclusiva is sweeter and fuller, with more dried fruit. Ron Zacapa 23 sits close to Diplomatico in style.