Maison La Mauny

La Mauny comes from the southern hills of Martinique above the Riviere-Pilote. The Bellonie brothers bought the estate in 1923, eventually forming the BBS group.

Start with the aged Le Nouveau Monde 12yr, the everyday benchmark of the house range, which the RumX community describes with wood, banana, vanilla and orange peel. Then look at the independent Chantal Comte bottlings such as La Tour de l'Or: they are drawn from old La Mauny stock, which is why they appear on this page although La Mauny did not bottle them. The community describes La Tour de l'Or with wood, tobacco, vanilla and spice.

Yes: since BBS shut the Trois Rivieres distillery in 2003 or 2004, the brand has been made at La Mauny on its original still, which was uprooted and trucked ten minutes down the road along with all its ageing casks. Duquesne is made the same way, so both are famous brands whose distilleries no longer smoke. The Trois Rivieres site survives as a tourist stop, complete with a Hollywood-style hillside sign. In production terms, modern Trois Rivieres is a La Mauny brand.

La Mauny is one of Martinique's largest producers: its five column stills can make 3 million litres a year, of which about half is actually produced. Each still is labelled with the brand it distils. Master distiller Henry Vicrobeck calls them his beasts and names them after cars, one an F1, another a 2CV. La Mauny itself comes off three stills, two built by Alambic Mareste in Cognac; Trois Rivieres and Duquesne each have a dedicated column. Around 5,000 casks age in the warehouses.

La Mauny works cane from its own 259 hectares (plus around 120 for Trois Rivieres) and from nearly 80 independent planters, ferments the juice with six yeast strains and distils it on its column stills. A computer constantly adjusts the milling water to hold the juice's sugar level steady. The yeast works in 27 tanks, three of them mother tanks run on a semi-continuous, solera-like cycle for consistency. An overhead pipeline carries the new spirit 500 metres to the warehouses, a smart move against fire.