Buy Planteray

Planteray is the rum brand of Maison Ferrand, the French house led by Alexandre Gabriel, who founded it as Plantation in 1999. Most of the rum is distilled in the Caribbean, with Barbados and the historic West Indies Rum Distillery at its heart, then shipped to France for a second maturation in ex-cognac casks. This double ageing, tropical first and continental second, is the signature: it rounds the rum out and layers in the soft, fruity cognac-cask character the range is known for.

In 2024 Maison Ferrand renamed the whole range from Plantation to Planteray. The reason was the word itself: as Alexandre Gabriel told us in our interview, the name was meant to honour the land and the people who farm it, but it carried a painful legacy of slavery, especially in Barbados and Jamaica where the rum is made. The new name joins plant and ray, for the sunlight that grows the cane, and was unveiled on Barbados with the team. Only the name changed: the rums, the distilleries and the blends behind them are the same, so a bottle that says Plantation and one that says Planteray are the same liquid.

Almost everything at Planteray runs through double ageing, two maturation phases in two climates. Phase one happens at origin: the rum rests in the Caribbean in ex-bourbon casks, in heat and high humidity. The wood gives fast, producing vanilla, caramel and tropical fruit, and the cask loses around 7 percent a year to the air by the house's own figure.

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.

The flagship is the Planteray XO 20th Anniversary, a soft, polished Barbados blend and the bottle most people mean by Planteray. For something different there is Cut & Dry, a coconut rum that uses a whole Barbados coconut per litre, and the multi-origin Sealander. 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. There is also a familiar line of pineapple, overproof and white rums for cocktails. Start with the XO, then chase the high-ester and single-cask bottlings as your taste deepens.

One practical note: the rename has not worked through the whole range yet. Several of the best-known bottles still carry the old 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. They are the same rums either way.

The 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.

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 pattern is clear: the well-known core blends carry a dosage, while the limited single casks and festival releases almost never do.

The community rates the two groups differently. Across all bottlings with at least 50 ratings, the dosed ones sit at a median of 7.2 and the undosed ones at 8.0. It is not a rule, as the undosed O.F.T.D. Overproof shows: built at 69 percent as a cocktail rum, it still lands at 7.0. But the direction holds. 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.

The XO 20th Anniversary is built to be sipped neat or over one large cube, and its rounded, lightly sweet profile also makes a fine rum old fashioned. The pineapple (Stiggins' Fancy), overproof OFTD and white rums are made for cocktails, from a daiquiri to a tiki long drink, and Cut & Dry is the easy pick for a pina colada. The high-ester Hogo Monsters and the single casks are for sipping neat in a tulip glass, where their intensity and fruit get room to show. Save those for when you want to taste what high-ester and single-cask Planteray can do at full volume.

Planteray is a rare case where the flagship is both the most popular and genuinely well-liked: the XO 20th Anniversary is by far the most-logged bottle in the RumX community and still holds a strong rating, unlike the entry bottles of some sweet brands. Behind it the most-logged bottles are the cocktail workhorses, the O.F.T.D. overproof and the pineapple, not the collector releases.

The top of the rating table looks different, as the dosage chapter above shows in numbers: it belongs to the limited, undosed end, the high-ester Hogo Monsters, the festival Barbados High Ester releases and rare single casks like the 40-year Clarendon Jamaica MMW 1984. Read the ranked list with the rating count beside it, because those bottles rest on a few dozen ratings while the XO rests on thousands.