England's oldest wine vendor reveals: we're not taking our rum seriously enough

Like most girls of my generation, my introduction to spirits came with rum.  Rum and coke was sweet and easy to drink, had little taste of alcohol and was trending high in my teenage years along with Miami Vice and big hair.  My propensity for beach holidays, decades of family Christmases in Florida and a continuing sweet tooth have combined to keep rum a constant friend.  But it's usually a subtle one, hidden behind fruit juices, coconut milk, handfuls of greenery and festive barware.  And that's where it's remained for most drinkers.  Whether they love it or hate it, people on both sides tend to dismiss rum as a hard-working back player in the bar, providing an often muted alcoholic kick to fuel your cocktails.

Rob Whitehead wants to change that.  He's a spirits buyer at Berry Brothers and Rudd, one of the oldest and most prestigious wine shops in the world.  He believes rum can be sipped like, and taken just as seriously as, single malt whiskys.  And why not?  The distillation and ageing process is almost the same, differing only in the starting materials.  (Rum from the by-products of sugar production, whisky from barley.)

This isn't, of course, a completely novel idea.  Almost eight years ago, the sommelier at the much-missed Roussillon rounded out our evening with a blind tasting of a magnificent post-prandial selection that turned out to be a boutique rum.  (For a recap of that wonderful meal, click here.)  But he was unusual.  And though we're currently seeing a swarm of boutique distilled gin and vodka, "rum" and "connoisseur" are words that don't often go together.

While Berry's is best known for its fine wines, the company has an equally prestigious history supplying spirits.  If you search "rum" on their web site you'll come up with three pages packed with options.  Though heavy on Caribbean suppliers, options come from all over the world and many bear Berry's own label.  Last night, Rob took us through an informative tasting of five at the Warehouse Shop in Basingstoke.  One was the Mauritian "Penny Blue", the other four Berry's own labels from Panama, Haiti, Jamaica and the Caribbean.  These were all fine sipping rums, free of the added sugars and colours in their commercial cousins and meant to be slowly savoured neat, or with a little water.

My first important lesson was in what Berry's "own label" actually means.  In supermarkets, where we're most familiar with the concept, companies are contracting out to food producers who often make the same stuff for many others.  One Christmas Pudding manufacturer, for example, might churn out own-label treats for Sainsbury's, Aldi and Waitrose.  The stores' involvement is as simple as picking the flavourings and ingredients to give their version an individual twist, and designing labels. They don't actually make anything.  Berry's process (for both rum and whisky) is completely different.  They identify small distilleries they like, keep an eye on their production and buy casks of young, freshly-distilled spirit from years they think are worth betting on.  They then take over the aging, often deciding what kind of barrels to use, where to age (most of their stock is laid down in a warehouse outside of Glasgow), what to blend (should any blending take place) and when to bottle.  In this way, Berry's is at least as responsible as the distiller for the final product, if not more so.

Secondly, I discovered that the choice of barrels, the length and condition of ageing the rum is exactly the same as in whisky production.  The Caribbean rum (in this case, from Trinidad and Tobago) was aged in situ in wooden barrels in warm, humid conditions.  It had lots of tannins and an almost smoky flavour.  Glasgow's more temperate conditions led to a softer end product with other examples.

Rob explained that there are traditionally three styles of rum, tracing back to the countries that originally colonised the territories now producing.  Spanish style is light.  British is heavy, suiting the bulk procurement for the Navy that fuelled most of its production.  And French, said Rob, "is just weird."

That weirdness splits opinion.  The Haitian we tried was my favourite (I found it the sweetest, thickest on the tongue and most floral of the offerings), while my husband hated it.  The biggest difference in production comes right at the start.  French style rums are distilled from the cane juice normally boiled down to make sugar, while the rest of the world's production comes from the molasses by-products of the sugar-making process.  This "agricole" rum makes no sense commercially, as it gives the cane farmer just one product rather than two.  It's certainly worth a try for the curious, though its limited production and costly start in life mean it will always be on the pricier side.

A world away from the Haitian was the Jamaican, so strong on tar and smoke notes you'd swear you were drinking an Islay whisky.  This, said Rob, was as close as you could get to the authentic taste of the stuff drunk in Nelson's Navy.  You can add this to weevil-infested biscuits, sadistic captains and risk of death tumbling from the rigging as reasons I wouldn't have chosen a career at sea in 1810.  To my taste, the Jamaican was vile.  But plenty of people like Laphroig. If you do, this is your rum.

My husband and I agreed on the Mauritian and the Panamanian.  They both shared a light, honeyed smoothness, with the Panamanian having just a bit more alcoholic burn on the finish.  We decided to buy some of the first.  Not only did we both love it, but it comes from the island where we spent our honeymoon.  Ironically, they don't sell it there.  The distillery sends its less sophisticated products to the local resorts, where they get mixed in fanciful concoctions and served to honeymooners with fruit and parasol garnishes.  More mature drinkers back in cold, rainy England can use the premium distillation to carry their souls back to that paradise island.

Or that, at least, is where my mind will be going when I sip my Penny Blue in front of the fire this winter.