47,450 days…

Here is the number of days that separate us from the birth of this rum. 1885, a year that seems so far away that one might wonder if it really existed: Zola published Germinal a few months before Victor Hugo left this world at the age of 83; The same year, a certain Louis Pasteur saved the first child from rabies. And during this time, rum was being made at the Saint-James distillery, as it is still being made some 127,837 days later.

Let's stay with Pasteur for a moment, because at that time his work on pasteurization was not yet too widespread, which is why St-James heated his cane juice (without boiling it and therefore without reaching the syrup stage) to eliminate all the germs, before inoculating it with yeast for fermentation that took place in the open air, in wooden vats, and for several days. A process that would continue until the 1930s, when the first stainless steel vats arrived. It was therefore indeed agricultural rum, there is no doubt about that, and only its age is still up for debate today:

For Marc Sassier, a history buff and oenologist at the Saint-James distillery (and much more): "the first advertisement dates from 1900, and even if we don't know the exact bottling date, we can deduce that it could have been 4 or 5 years old, and in any case 3 years minimum given its concentration and the quantity of tannin present". The rum is therefore at least 3 years old, but could just as easily be 15... This is a mystery that will surely hang over this vintage for a long time to come. We could also wonder how this rum got here, to this day? It was actually discovered late (nearly a century after it was bottled): St-James is said to have found traces of a stock in Amsterdam in one of its branches. And in the early 80s, a certain Luca Gargano (always ahead of his time) discovered it, before deciding to invest in the purchase of some 300 bottles in the early 90s, in partnership with a certain Pepi Mongiardino (director of Moon Import, another great figure in Italian trade). The rest is history, and this vintage, the rarest and surely the most expensive in the world, is considered a real GRAIL. Let's taste it.

The color of this rum is impressive, and so concentrated that it is practically opaque to light: coffee-colored, it is heavy and fertile, filled with vessels that navigate on the thin walls of the glass, as if in a storm at sea, tracing sinuous and tormented lines in a dark night struck by lightning, or perhaps by gunpowder.

The nose is so heavy that it would knock you over, a nasal uppercut of sorts, a technical KO before a first contact. The atmosphere is heavy, and the coffee color gives way to a bistro nose: that of the morning black, tight and compact. The bowl of dried fruits is never far away, with ghostly curves chiseled on the zinc counter, an obligatory patch to quench the thirst of the earliest adventurers; in truth, anything tanned could ideally qualify the sniffer of this old man: prunes, grapes, figs, olives, not to mention a piece of leather still smoking; surely the reminiscences of an orphan jacket forgotten on the bar, vestige of a quick and insidious escape, symbolic and empyreumatic victim of a time too quickly forgotten.

We could add liquorice, or even a touch of tar, but there is more: small, acidic and sweet red fruits that reach the nose, to flatter the fateful moment. But despite this apparent heaviness, the nose has something, strangely, light; it is balsamic, heavy and sour, but with a certain delicacy, a modest tenderness, and fundamentally elegant.

In the middle of a silent and smoky crowd, immersed in the atmosphere of a bistro, who has never encountered this touching look of a solid fellow drowning his sorrows in a balloon; this lost look and for whom time has no direction, this empty look, sometimes black, but so light, filled with an outdated hope, sad and comforting at the same time. You are there, and with you, the still smoking carcasses of our ancestors. The sugar is browned, and where a molasses rum would surely have darkened this picture with a whiff of nostalgia, the agricultural gives it back pastel colors and substance, with an assertive and assured complexity.

A heavy rum would never have seemed so light and alive; a rustic man would never have seemed so fragile and talkative…

The palate is thick and dark, warm, and rather dry; the liquorice and restrained notes of tobacco caress a slightly acidic fruitiness (blackcurrant, prunes) and naturally mature, without sugar and without frills. A taste of authenticity, of truth, black as the refuge of color. The oak, the tannins that one could fear in mass, slumped at a table and whose looks speak volumes, are very well integrated, assimilated, melted, and strangely silent in the middle of the onlookers. Impressive and disconcerting. The olive is there too , nuts, and everything that is black but in a sumptuous balance and a complexity without equal. And where has the bitterness gone? Lost or drowned at sea surely, or left at the door of good resolutions, who really knows. It will only be summed up more beautifully in the sweetness of memories.

The finish is not excessively long or fiery, but the memory left by this rum will last for hours, and it even seems stuck somewhere between the palate and the mind, outside of time. But can we really blame it for not wanting to disappear? Endearing, if not staining… a brown stain persists on the X-ray of the worm, a sign of time and its irreparable damage.

In his last breath, he releases liquorice, light armoured tannins and dried fruits, but also freshness, at the very end; as if to remind us of his kinship, and to speak to us of the future, this ghost with empty hands, who promises everything and has nothing...

It took me almost 2 years before I dared to open my sample, a trifle, torn between fear and apprehension, feverish and dizzy at the mere mention of this other time, this other world. It was a good thing I finally gave in to temptation, even if this first tasting is also synonymous with the last. In any case, it is not the kind of rum that you abuse.

The moment I opened this glass house, I made a time flee that I could never catch up with, or even touch. We are never much, but after all, what is a year or two if not the infinite volume of a pinch of seconds? Note: 93

To help you (and me) find your way around, regarding the notes:

90 and + : exceptional and unique rum, it is the best of the best
between 85 and 89 : highly recommended rum, with that little something that makes the difference
between 80 and 84 : recommendable rum
75-79 POINTS : above average
70-74 POINTS : in the low average
less than 70 : not very good

Review courtesy of DuRhum.com.

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