Maison La Mauny

The name comes from Ferdinand Poulain, Count of Mauny, who bought the land around the Riviere-Pilote in the 18th century. The Code family installed the island's first pot still here in 1891, and the Bellonie brothers bought it in 1923, eventually forming the BBS group. After a tangle of mergers, France's antitrust authorities forced La Martiniquaise to sell La Mauny in 2011 to avoid a monopoly, and Campari bought it in 2019.

The still house lines up five column stills, each 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. Together they can make 3 million litres a year, of which about half is actually produced.

Trois Rivieres and Duquesne are famous brands whose distilleries no longer smoke. When BBS shut the Trois Rivieres distillery around 2002, the still was uprooted and trucked ten minutes down the road to La Mauny, along with all its aging casks. The Trois Rivieres site survives as a tourist stop, complete with a Hollywood-style hillside sign, but the rum is now made at La Mauny on those original stills. Modern Trois Rivieres is, in production terms, a La Mauny brand.

La Mauny owns 295 hectares of cane and buys from nearly 80 independent planters; lower-grade cane goes to the Le Galion sugar factory. A computer constantly adjusts the milling water to hold the juice's sugar level steady. Six yeast strains ferment 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, where around 5,000 casks age.

The highest-rated La Mauny on RumX is actually an independent: the Chantal Comte La Tour de l'Or at 9.1/10, drawn from old La Mauny stock and one of the best-loved Martinique rums on the platform. From the house range, the aged Le Nouveau Monde 12yr is the everyday benchmark. The Trois Rivieres vintages, made here, climb to 9.0/10 for the old 1980 millesime.