How did Caroni go from a little-known Trinidad rum brand to a connoisseur’s favourite?

Well, it was never a brand really. It was a distillery that supplied liquid to brands for blending. That was the case with most rum distilleries in the Caribbean – before 2000, only a few of their names were known internationally, like Appleton or Mount Gay. Yes, they bottled Caroni for the local market, but it was things like a 75% strength rum; rum punch or coconut rum. But distilleries like Caroni were owned by the companies who processed sugar – and, being colonies, these were European companies, such as Tate & Lyle from Britain, which owned Caroni. They distilled molasses so they had a by-product to sell on, not to build a rum brand. But it was when Luca Gargano, owner of the Italian drinks distributor Velier (and now my boss) went to Trinidad in 2004, that the story of Caroni began in a different sense.

Tell us the story of Luca’s visit...

So, he went with the photographer Fredi Marcarini, who is sadly no longer with us, to make a book about rum, visiting distilleries. He arrived at Caroni and found it was completely abandoned. It had been closed in 2002. It was a different time – nearly 25 years ago – and no one had put out a press release. All the sugar mills and distilleries on Trinidad were owned by the government, and they just shut that one down without a fuss. There wasn’t a culture of collecting rums or making rum websites and knowing all the distilleries around the Caribbean.

So what remained?

The buildings were beginning to fall apart; there was long grass and broken machinery; but it was like the workers had just left – a pair of gloves just lying there – great for the photographs. And there were some ladies there, caretakers of the site. Luca jokingly asked if there were a couple of casks left and one of the women showed him to a warehouse. He was surprised to see over a thousand barrels in there! He then asked if these were the last barrels from just before it closed down and she told him some of them were 20 years old! He had to fly out the next day but Fredi stayed and found the guy responsible for liquidating the distillery’s assets – a two-metre-tall Surinamese limbo dancer called Rudi Moore! - and began to buy casks to bottle. But Velier was a small company at the time, so they had to buy 70 casks or so, then make enough money to buy the next batch – before it got lost to blends or other people found it!

When Velier first bottled Caroni, what was the reaction?

Well, I can tell you that from an independent point of view, because I wasn’t working for Velier then, I was a customer! I ran a rum bar in Milano and they sent me a Caroni 1983. My reaction was, “OK, Caroni – never heard of it... sounds Italian... cool label with black & white photography... 63% ABV... no sugar added... what the **** is this?!” I personally liked it a lot – and it was priced low, at €30 + VAT a bottle. So I was using it, can you imagine, in cuba libres. My customers were happy because their cocktails were strong, and I was making a profit! But, the taste at the time for high-end rum was Ron Zacapa and that sort of thing, on the sweeter side... so Luca had a warehouse full of Caroni that no one wanted because it was super-old, very woody, with those burnt-tyre and petrol notes that make Caroni unique and amazing.

It sounds like a disaster. Given how many people love Caroni now, was it a case of it not finding its people at first?

The success came after Velier and La Maison du Whisky in France began to work closely together ( and eventually formed a company together). In 2010, when I first joined Velier, we went to Whisky Live in Paris, which is organised by La Maison, and sat at a little desk pouring Caroni and Demerara rums. And the whisky fans went mad for it. This time, when they said “WTF is this?” it was because they loved it. And, because they knew about Port Ellen and so on in whisky, they immediately understood the value of liquid from a closed distillery. And when the experts, the true collectors like Thierry Bénitah from La Maison du Whisky and Sukhinder from Elixir, who is a friend of Thierry’s, started talking about it, that’s when people realised.

So, what is the status of Caroni now?

We have had Caroni-mania. That meant that a lot of people wanted to collect it – someone from one online spirits auction site told me that they’d started it for Caroni trading! Other people bottle Caroni independently now, but there are only some like Sukhinder that you should trust! But La Maison & Velier owns the rights to the brand Caroni. Luca has occasionally said in a meeting, “We should buy the land in Trinidad; install fermentation vats and build a column stills like they had... and create Caroni number two.” I don’t know if he’s serious, but he’s crazy enough to try!

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