Venezuela Rum

Soft, round and dessert-like: Venezuelan rum is made from molasses and, traditionally, cane honey, distilled on a mix of pot stills, batch kettles and columns, then blended and aged long, often in solera systems. Unlike most of Latin America, which leans almost entirely on column stills, Venezuela holds onto its pot stills and batch kettles and layers heavy cask and solera aging on top. Like neighbouring Guyana, it has a deeper sugar and distilling past than most of the continent, and it shows in the complexity of its rums. The roots run deep: it was here that an army surgeon first blended the bitters that became Angostura. How the three distillation methods come together at Diplomatico, we break down in Diplomatico Deconstructed.

Two houses lead: Destilerias Unidas (DUSA) near La Miel, maker of Diplomatico and its Reserva Exclusiva, and Santa Teresa, run by the fifth generation of the Vollmer family and known for the 1796. Alongside them sit two big brands owned by Diageo, the cowboy-branded Pampero, founded in 1938, and Cacique. Both lead back to DUSA, one of the largest distilleries in the Caribbean: Cacique is distilled there under a long-term contract, and the heavy component of the Pampero blend comes from there too. Carupano rounds out the field.

At least two years: since 1954, Venezuelan law has required a minimum of two years of aging before a spirit can be called Venezuelan rum, a floor matched only by Cuba and the longest in the rum world. The country formalised this into a geographical indication, the D.O.C. Ron de Venezuela, first granted in 2003, updated in 2019 and submitted to the European Union in 2020. It is one of the oldest rum origin protections in the Americas.

A lot: oil first pushed sugar aside, then its collapse helped rum. Sugar was once Venezuela's main export, until oil was found in 1922 and made it one of the richest nations on earth. The later collapse of the oil economy brought hyperinflation that gutted the country, but it oddly helped local rum: Venezuelans who once made this the world's biggest importer of Johnnie Walker Black switched to home spirits. The same crisis hurt producers too, with cane shortages so severe that Santa Teresa suspended distillation for two months in 2014.