Santa Teresa

Santa Teresa comes from Venezuela, from the Hacienda Santa Teresa in Aragua state, an hour southwest of Caracas. The German immigrant Gustav Julius Vollmer arrived in 1830; his son Gustavo Julio Vollmer, whose mother was a cousin of Simon Bolivar, bought the hacienda and turned to sugarcane. He bought European stills in 1896 and registered the name Ron Santa Teresa in 1909. It is Venezuela's first registered distillery and the fourth-oldest registered company of any kind in the country, on land where Bolivar ratified the abolition of slavery in 1818. By the 1950s Santa Teresa held about 80 percent of the Venezuelan market.

Santa Teresa 1796 is the house's flagship, a blend of light, heavy and pot-still rums aged through its own solera: 540 Limousin oak casks that have not been emptied since the system started in 1992. Rum for bottling is drawn from one section, never more than half a cask, which is then refilled from another section, and the last section topped up with a blend of light, heavy and pot-still rums aged from 4 to 35 years. It carries no age statement. The result tastes almost nothing like the rest of the Santa Teresa range, a depth the source credits more to the pot stills than to the solera itself. In its tasting notes the community finds mostly vanilla, caramel, spice and dried fruit.

Start with the 1796, the flagship and the one to know; the everyday Gran Reserva and the Claro are the accessible entries. If you want more age and depth, step up to the extra-anejo Linaje. Independent bottlers occasionally release single casks from the distillery, like the Rum Shark Salto Angel.

From pasteurised molasses, on column stills that have run since 1905, when a sugar refinery still stood on site, plus a small steam-jacketed pot still that the house reinstated in 1988 for its flagship 1796. The four-column system makes 80,000 litres a day in two marques: a 75 percent heavy rum from the first column alone, and a 95 percent light rum through all four, both off a fast 14-hour continuous fermentation. The heavy rum gets a long batch fermentation.

Project Alcatraz is a gang-rehabilitation programme started at the distillery by CEO Alberto Vollmer: work and a place in organised rugby teams instead of prison. It began in the mid-2000s, after a gang member attacked a member of the distillery's security staff. Vollmer offered him a choice: hand him to the police, or work unpaid at the distillery for a few months. He chose the work, stayed, and drew in others. Soon Vollmer employed dozens of members of rival gangs, using rugby to teach discipline and channel anger. Project Alcatraz now combines vocational training, education and psychological support, and has been recognised by the World Bank and studied at Harvard.