Boozehound (27 page)

We must thank Ortega and the Sandinistas, however indirectly, for the outstanding quality of Flor de Caña. When the Sandinistas seized power in 1979 after overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship, the junta set extremely strict price controls—particularly on rum. Rather than sell its best rum under this system, Flor de Caña decided to store it away, letting it age in casks. When the Sandinista government fell in 1990, they owned a huge stock of some of the finest aged rums in the region. Some of those Sandinista-era rums are now on the market as twenty-plus-year-old bottlings.

During the 1990s, Nicaragua struggled to become a tourist destination, “the next Costa Rica,” as travel writers like me called it. Often it seemed so close but so far away. One night I was at Charly’s Bar in Granada, packed with tourists, surveying the vibrant scene. (Charly’s, oddly, had a wall dedicated to the 1980s heavy metal band the Scorpions; the German owner was a dead ringer for one of the band.) Anyway, I suddenly felt a hand smoothing a flyaway hair over my left ear. I swung around, and to my surprise, it was the friendly young Nicaraguan woman tending bar. “Sorry,” she said. “Your hair was out of place and I was just brushing it back for you.” She laughed really awkwardly, letting me know she meant nothing wanton by the gesture.

I assured her it was no problem and ordered another round. “There are a lot more foreigners in town these days, aren’t there?” I said. “A lot more gringos.”

“Oh yes,” she said, pouring a drink. “And why not? We’re all friends now, after all.”

Then, another night, I found myself in the bar of Managua’s Hotel InterContinental, drinking a twelve-year-old Flor de Caña. All around me, businessmen—some in bad suits, some in flower-print shirts trying to look tropical-casual—talked in hushed tones. They had been warned by their waiters not to walk the streets, to take only specific taxis, to visit only the fashionable bars guarded by men with shotguns and AK-47s.

I was approached by a man who was either an Ernest Hemingway wannabe or a Jimmy Buffett wannabe (it’s often difficult to spot the difference). This guy wore a bushy mustache, shorts, sandals, a beaded necklace, and a Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball hat.

He bought a shot of Flor de Caña, drank it, and, without so much as a hello, asked me, “Do you know any good strip clubs?”

“No,” I said.

“Whorehouses?”

“No.”

“Well, what the hell are you doing here in this country, then?” he asked.

“Just visiting,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Whatever the hell I want to.”

In late 2006, Nicaragua had a contest to name its
trago nacional
, or “national swig.” The impetus seems to have been a sense of cultural envy: Cuba had its mojito. Mexico had the margarita. Why didn’t Nicaragua have its own cocktail? One of the contest judges, the French ambassador to Nicaragua, was quoted in the
New York Times
as saying, “Nicaragua needs a new identity that doesn’t have anything to do with revolution. This is a chance.” The winning cocktail, the Macua, is pretty tasty: equal parts white rum and guava juice, with lemon juice and simple syrup.

The last time I was in Nicaragua, in 2007, happened to be only a few months after the unveiling of the Macua. Though I saw a number of promotional cards with the recipe, I did not see one person order the drink. There had been some light criticism in the Managua newspapers that the drink had to be made with Flor de Caña rum, the contest sponsor. But there were other, more important things going on in Nicaragua at that time, such as another ugly presidential campaign that, this time around, saw Daniel Ortega return to power. At most of the bars I went to in Managua, people were just drinking beer or Flor de Caña rum by the bottle, like always.

I’m always intrigued when a city or nation is moved to create some representative cocktail of place. The last time I saw it was in the spring of 2009. The Tourism Authority of Thailand made what it called “a move to give the Thai tourism and hospitality industries a much-needed boost.” So what game-changing action did they take in the midst of a global economic collapse? Offer deep discounts on flights and hotels? Rebrand the nation with lavish full-page ads in travel magazines? Privatize the national airline? No, nothing like that. Here’s what happened: they invented a new cocktail. It’s called the Siam Sunray, and it involves vodka, coconut liqueur, lemongrass, ginger, and Thai chile peppers. “Successful signature drinks are one way to fast-track holiday destinations onto the world tourism map,” said the authority in a joint statement issued with the Thai Hotels Association.

I’ve seen it happen around the world, from developing nations to our nation’s capital. We’ve seen some older, classic drinks recently resurrected as signature cocktails with some success. Every summer, for instance, the D.C. Craft Bartenders Guild raises awareness about the Lime Rickey’s rightful place as Washington’s native cocktail. In 2008, the state legislature of Louisiana, in a grandiose move, voted to designate the Sazerac the official cocktail of New Orleans.

I wonder about this nearly universal desire for a signature drink to call one’s own. We’d all love to have a drink named after ourselves, like Hemingway’s daiquiri, the Papa Doble. But I don’t know if you can just invent one out of thin air. I wish I could be a fly on the wall in one of these tourism authority boardrooms when the signature cocktail discussions happen: “Okay, people, we’re not leaving here until someone comes up with our new official drink. Look, Brazil has its caipirinha, and Peru has its pisco sour. In Spain, they dump fruit and brandy into red wine and call it a national drink. For god’s sake, even Martinez, California, has a cocktail they claim is the precursor to the martini. Think outside the box!”

Nothing sells escapism like a good umbrella drink, but rum is so much more than that. I’m thinking specifically about the sipping rums that I taste every year when I attend TasteDC’s big annual Rum Festival, held at the Woman’s National Democratic Club during the hot Washington, D.C., summer.

Annual sales of premium rum are up about 40 percent since 2002, and I’ve come to think of rum as one of the most complicated and fascinating spirits in the liquor store. Still, a rum tasting is quite different from a wine tasting. What is a rum tasting like? Let me quickly dispense with a few of your more pressing questions:

• No, neither Captain Morgan Spiced Rum nor Malibu coconut rum is served.
  
• Yes, there may be a $279 aged rum on offer.
  
• No, there is never a frozen daiquiri nor a blueberry mojito nor a Bahama Mama to be found.
  
• No, no one described anything as “grassy” or “fruit forward” or “mature yet owns the promise of youthfulness.”
  
• Yes, I’ve seen several young women drawing smiley faces on their tasting sheets to mark the rums they liked and frowny faces to mark the ones they didn’t.
  
• Yes, I overheard someone ask, “So, Guatemala … that’s where, Central America, right?”
  
• Yes, there are numerous middle-aged men wearing Jimmy Buffet–esque island-print shirts, including one shirt I saw with pictures of bongos.
  
• No, there is not a lot of spitting going on.
  

All of which makes for a much more fun event than most other tastings I attend. Rum is, of course, a sugarcane-based spirit, but it has many variations. Some (say, from the English-speaking islands) are darker and fuller and use more molasses, while some (say, from the Spanish-speaking nations) are lighter and use less molasses. Some, made purely with sugarcane juice (say, from the French-speaking islands) use no molasses. Then there are varying amounts of barrel aging. The quality and complexity of rums overall has improved dramatically since the days of Hemingway: some of them have a fiery, smoky finish; others display more rounded hints of vanilla or caramel. The range is diverse.

With so many nations represented in the room—from Venezuela to Haiti to Martinique to Barbados—there are bound to be some regional rivalries. Once, I chatted near the hors d’oeuvres table with an international couple, the wife from Trinidad and the husband from Guyana. “Have you tried some of our rums from Trinidad yet?” asked the woman, insisting I get myself a taste of 10 Cane rum.

I asked her husband what he’d tasted. “Well, since I’m from Guyana,” he said, “I’ve been tasting mostly the rums from Guyana.” At my enthusiastic prodding, he sampled one of the Guatemalan rums and told me, with a shrug, that he was unimpressed. I then moved over to one of the stars of the evening, from Guyana: a seventeen-year-old rum, aged in Syrah casks, produced by Murray McDavid ($89). I noticed that the people with whom I tasted the Murray McDavid drifted back to that table several times during the evening. I could see why the guy from Guyana had been so smug.

I’m always amazed at how expensive rum has gotten over the past decade: Zacapa 23 from Guatemala ($41), Mount Gay Extra Old from Barbados ($42), and the Santa Teresa Antiguo de Solera from Venezuela ($37) are just a few examples. Of course, the Cask 1623 rum produced by Pyrat, with its outlandish $279 price tag, was … nice? (And by “nice” I mean “not worth the money.”) I began looking around for bottles that might convince a rum newbie or skeptic that the spirit is sophisticated and versatile. I found several outstanding aged rums for less than $30. You cannot go wrong with any of these: Pampero Aniversario Añejo from Venezuela at $29; Mount Gay Eclipse from Barbados at $27; and my old friend, seven-year-old Flor de Caña Grand Reserve at $24.

“Is aged rum the new single-malt Scotch?” my editor once asked. Hmm … perhaps? I find myself turning much more often to rums, served neat or on the rocks, than I do to other high-end sprits. A similar tasting challenge is there. Sometimes it takes a little time to wrap one’s mind around a spirit. Take, for instance, rhum agricole from Martinique.

“Since when do you spell rum with an ‘h’?” a friend asked when I served him a tasting flight of rhum agricole.

“It’s French,” I explained.

“Figures.” He took his first sip. “Okay, I’m out of my comfort zone,” he said. “Since when does rum taste like fresh-cut grass?”

“So,” I said. “Is that your tasting note? This rum with an ‘h’ is grassy?” My friend extended me his middle finger.

I could empathize, and I felt for a moment like the dreaded Scotch snob pushing a big, smoky peat monster on a newbie (which I guess would go hand in hand with rum being the new single-malt Scotch). Anyway, rhum agricole may be the most complex rum of all. Only a handful of distilleries on Martinique and Guadeloupe are governed by an AOC, bestowed by the French government in 1996. Most other rums are made from molasses, but rhum agricole must be produced from 100 percent fresh, pure sugarcane juice. Some of the distilleries insist that their sugarcane be pressed within an hour of being cut in the fields. Rhum agricole is distilled at a lower proof than other rums to capture more of the natural qualities of the sugarcane. The result is that rhum agricole becomes another spirit that can actually claim terroir.

It’s an acquired taste, and honestly I didn’t get it at the outset. The white took some experimenting to learn to mix with, and I thought the aged versions seemed a little too grassy. Or vegetal. But soon enough I started to truly appreciate rhum agricole. Learning to love rhum agricole is really no different from learning to appreciate complex wines such as Barolo or Châteauneuf-du-Pape—and it’s infinitely easier than learning to love, say, Italian amari. So distinct is rhum agricole from other rums that the San Francisco World Spirits Competition recently instituted a separate category for the spirit.

“It’s like the difference between Scotch and bourbon,” said Ben Jones, a fourth-generation member of the Clément family who imports both Rhum Clément and Rhum J.M. from Martinique and has become rhum agricole’s biggest booster in the United States. “It’s just a different flavor profile.” Lower distilling temperatures make for a huge contrast with molasses-based rums. “Once you cook the sugar, you’ve cooked off all the terroir and the finer qualities of what the sugarcane has to offer,” Jones said.

After finally wrapping his mind around rhum agricole—extra “h” and all—even my friend had to agree.