Rum from Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia belongs to the British Windward Islands, alongside Dominica, St. Vincent and Grenada, and most distilleries on those islands only ever served their home market. Saint Lucia is the exception. Today it has a single rum maker, St. Lucia Distillers, born in 1972 from the merger of Denis Barnard's Dennery distillery on the east coast and the Geest family's Roseau Bay distillery on the west.

Saint Lucia gave up commercial cane around 1962, so the rum is built almost entirely from imported molasses, typically 2,000 to 2,500 tonnes a year from the Dominican Republic, Central America or Guyana. A tanker anchors in Roseau Bay, a diver connects a hose, and the molasses flows about two kilometres through an undersea pipeline to the distillery. A single 15-acre cane field beside the buildings, hand-cut once a year, feeds tiny batches of cane-juice rum that widen the blender's palette.

In the 1990s the island's own market was dominated by imported Mount Gay and Cockspur from Barbados, both seen as a cut above the local Bounty. St. Lucia Distillers won its home ground back, then turned to the premium export market with Chairman's Reserve and the super-premium Admiral Rodney, named after the British admiral who won the 1782 Battle of the Saintes off these waters. Admiral Rodney was built as a statement of how far Saint Lucia rum could go.

On 2 May 2007, masked men stormed the distillery, doused the office files in rum and set them alight, an act of sabotage meant to destroy evidence of fraud. The fire gutted the admin block and most of the blending house, and set the company back years. Out of the chaos came a happy accident: barrels packed into makeshift rooms were forgotten and later rediscovered, older than planned, and bottled as the much-loved Forgotten Casks. In 2016 Spiribam, the GBH group that owns Martinique's J.M and Clement, took over.

The everyday face of Saint Lucia is the Chairman's Reserve Forgotten Casks, the most reviewed bottle on the platform, with the Chairman's Reserve 1931 and Admiral Rodney Extra Old above it for the aged blends. But the very top scores come from the huge independent single-cask scene: bottlings like the Velier Warren Khong 2010 reach 9.0/10, proof of how much character SLD's pot stills carry.