Rum from Martinique

Most rum starts from molasses, the sticky leftover of sugar making. Martinique's rhum agricole instead ferments and distills the fresh juice pressed straight from the cane, which is why it tastes green, grassy and alive rather than dark and sweet. The island calls the molasses kind rhum industriel, and today makes it at just one distillery. Everything else is agricole, the style Martinique gave the world.

In 1996 Martinique won the first AOC ever granted to a rum, the same kind of protected origin that governs Champagne or Bordeaux. It dictates everything: only fresh local cane juice, distillation on a single creole column to between 65 and 75 percent, a minimum rest, and a floor for aromatic compounds set back in 1938. The age ladder runs from blanc up through élevé sous bois, vieux, VSOP and the six-year XO.

In 1902 Mount Pelée erupted and wiped out Saint-Pierre, the Paris of the Caribbean, killing nearly everyone and every distillery in the city. Rum came back, but the long decline did not stop: Martinique had around 150 working distilleries in 1939 and is down to about seven today, what locals call the fumante, the ones still smoking. Cane acreage has fallen by two thirds since 1960, much of it lost to bananas.

A handful of houses make all of it. The family-run Neisson and La Favorite sit beside the bigger Saint-James, Depaz, La Mauny, J.M and Simon. Several beloved names, Trois Rivières, Clément and Dillon among them, are phantom brands: their distilleries closed, but the rum lives on, made at one of the survivors.

Agricole rewards the RumX community generously. The everyday white rhum is the heart of a Ti Punch, but the scores climb into the nines for aged vintages: the Velier Neisson 70th Anniversary and La Favorite's La Flibuste sit near the top, alongside old Saint-James and J. Bally millésimes. Martinique is one of the few islands where a tightly regulated style still produces genuine collector rum.