The rest of the story

The early spin on the Havana Club/Havana Club dispute was pretty simple: the Cubans expropriated private property, and the U.S. government made right by returning it to its rightful owners.

But as I've suggested in earlier posts, the story is far more complex and interesting, whatever of your opinion of the Bearded One.

The Miami Herald, which has been out front on the Bacardi/Pernod Ricard story all along, published a fine piece today that looks at the broader implications for international trade and trademarks. The take-away quote:

''Basically, [the United States] let politics trump trademark policy,'' [said said William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council.] "They took care of one company at the expense of a lot of others.''

The article, by Matthew Haggman, highlights something that's obvious but often overlooked: international trademark law is an incredibly delicate bit of business. Like currency, trademarks only have value if everyone agrees that they have value. If someone starts mucking around with longstanding agreements, there's incentive for everyone to start mucking. Castro pointed this up when he threatened to produce Coca-Cola and Bacardi a few years ago, which seemed sort of funny. But few are laughing now -- especially those major coporations that have worked hard to ensure that some enterprising fellow in, say, Scotland, can't open a McDonald's Hamburger Restaurant chain. As Haggman writes:

Some now fear the decision could set a precedent that other countries can use to cancel trademarks or play politics with intellectual property law. Arab countries, for instance, could cancel trademarks for companies friendly to Israel or Pakistan could do the same with marks owned by companies working in India, said Reinsch.

Bacardi spokesperson defends their action by noting, ''All companies would fight to protect their brand." Of course, Havana Club is not really their brand -- they acquired lapsed rights solely in a bid to protect their market share in the United States when the Cuban trade embargo is eventually lifted.

The real story, which has yet to be told in detail, is how Bacardi got a law changed that benefited them at the expense of hundreds of other companies. The Herald has re-opened a door to this line of inquiry -- one that leads to a room with Tom Delay, Connie Mack and others. I'm hoping Haggman or someone else spends a bit more time explaining how everyone came to be in this room, and why.

A face for radio

Saturday's All Things Considered on NPR aired a five-minute interview with me, in which I got to talk about my favorite subject with host Debbie Elliot. If you don't have the time to read a whole book, or don't have the $24, think of this as the Cliff Notes version. But only up to the colonial era. If you want to know about rum in the last century, you'll have to spring for all 300 pages.

It's accessible via streaming audio online at NPR's web site.

Cuba Rican Rum

OK, I guessed wrong when I wrote that Bacardi would be probably repackage one of its premium aged rums as the new "Havana Club" (see below). It turns out it's a white rum, and the bottle makes it look like a Grey Goose that ate too much and then got a 1920s makeover.

So what's actually in the bottle? I'll take it at face value that Bacardi is using the old Archebala family "recipe" to make the white rum in Puerto Rico. I won't even set off on a tangent here about "premium white rums" – the idea of which seems to me to borrow more from vodka's marketing than the tradition of quality rum-making. I'd really like to put the new product through a blind taste test with Bacardi Silver, along with some other premium white rums (perhaps Matusalem), and see how the flavor profiles differ. Then I'd like to throw history into the mix: a 1920s-era Havana Club, and the Pernod Ricard Havana Club to find out which is closest to the original.

Pernod-Ricard promises to keep fighting, noting that labeling a Puerto Rican rum as a Cuban product is misleading. (Bacardi, naturally, disagrees. ''Consumers are smart and savvy; they can read the front of the bottle,'' the Miami Herald quoted Patricia Neal, Bacardi spokeswoman, as saying. Of course, if consumers were truly smart and savvy, the advertising industry would not exist.) Bacardi also pointed out, perhaps more persuasively, that Pernod Ricard owns Malibu rum, which is produced in Barbados.

Anyway, there appears to be historic precedent for selling Havana Club Puerto Rican rum. Ads ran in American newspapers in the 1940s, during the liquor shortages of World War II, advertising "Havana Club Puerto Rican Rum."

Moving rapidly into the United States is clearly a good defensive move on Bacardi's part. Havana Club has gone from a regional curiosity to an economic powerhouse in the decade plus since Pernod Ricard put its marketing might behind it. It's gone from selling 300,000 cases per year to 2.4 million (mostly in Europe and Canada), and that's without access to the U.S. market. If the embargo were ever lifted (and with Castro's weakening that prospect seems ever closer), Pernod Ricard would be able to quickly ride a tide of interest in all things Cuban to a strong position in the American marketplace.

In truth, I'm less concerned about two foreign companies wrestling over a symbol than I am about the vodkaization of rum. (Something that plagued the industry in the 1950s). But that's another post.

Havana Club – or is that “Havana Club”? – comes to Florida this week

It truly has not been a good week for Fidel Castro.

On August 3 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled in favor of the Bacardi corporation – in effect, decreeing that the Cuban government no longer owned the Havana Club trademark in the United States, and that Bacardi was now the legal owner of it.

Bacardi wasted no time. It announced today that the new Havana Club will be on sale in Florida later this week as a premium product priced at $20 a bottle. (Just in time to toast Fidel's ill-health, I suppose.) It will roll out to other states as the market warrants. Links to a Miami Herald story and the Bacardi release are below.

The struggle over the Havana Club name dates back more than a decade, and I won't rehash it here. (I touch on it slightly in the book, but, really, a whole other book could be dedicated to the legal wrangling of this case – which includes Bacardi's contributions to Tom Delay and Connie Mack to get favorable measures put into law, Castro's threats to start producing a product called "Coca-Cola," and much, much more.)

The upshot is that there will now be two Havana Club rums for sale globally. The Havana Club produced in Havana by the Castro government (and distributed worldwide by liquor giant Pernod Ricard since 1993), and the Bacardi Havana Club, which will be available only in the United States.

So which should be regarded as the original, and which gets the "quotation marks"?

The Havana-made Havana Club has the rights of claiming terrior, if there is such a thing in rum-making. Bacardi's Havana Club, in contrast, is made in the giant factory in Puerto Rico. Point: Cuban version.

As for taste, I'm not sure. The Miami Herald story quotes Ramon Arechabala, who is from the family who made the original rum in Cuba, as saying the current Cuban product is unpotable. "Fidel lacks the formula of the right Havana Club,'' he said.

I used to be a big fan of Havana Club – it was one of the first rums that I tried years ago that showed me that rum could be complex – but I don't think it's as good as it once was. Perhaps the demand in Europe and Canada caught the Cubans with short stocks of good aged rum, and some shortcuts had to be taken. (Imagine Gaelic shrug of shoulders here.) A former employee of the company once told me diplomatically, "At Havana Club, maybe they use a different calendar than you and me."

Bacardi does not say in its press release that it plans to resurrect the original Arechabala family techniques in distilling the old Havana Club. If I had to guess, I would think that the Havana Club moving into Florida this week will be some variation or blend of the Reserva or Anjeo or Bacardi 8 with a new label. (And I haven't seen the label yet - and I'm curious.)

But a blind tasting might be in order. I would love to sample three bottles: an original, pre-Castro Havana Club, the Pernod Ricard distributed version, and the Bacardi version. Paging Stephen Remsberg.

The U.S. courts and trademark office have spoken. Now let the people decide.

Miami Herald story
Bacardi press release

More tales from the crypt

I've been in Martinique all this week on assignment for a magazine to write about rum. (Yes, I know, shocking.) I've visited a half a dozen distilleries, and tasted more rum than is probably medically prudent. I've learned to my disappointment that there's not much of an adventurous cocktail culture here, but that a strong rum culture thrives. A tumbler of rum, I've also learned, makes a passable substitute for an early morning glass of orange juice.

I'm of course required to save most of my reporting for the magazine that paid for my trip, but I can't help but briefly mention a couple of brushes with historic rums.

I had a memorable dinner the other night at a restaurant called La Plantation. But the capstone of the evening was when the waiter rolled out a cart of old Martinique rums available by the glass. Here was history: rums spanning a recent island history, from a St. Etienne rum dating from 1960 (at $57 a shot), to some of more recent vintage. I tried a 1976 Clement, and also sipped a 1991 J.M. (Rums are dated like vintage wines here, and contain at least 50 percent from that year; most were aged in wood at least 10 years before being bottled.) Both rums were remarkable, but the J.M was the more remarkabler.

Last night, I had dinner at Cap Est, a Relais and Chateau property with an open air dining room that's at once spare and luxurious. (Every upscale restaurant seems to serve up the oddly wonderful combination of foie gras and fried plantains, and each claims they invented it.)

After dinner, I muckled on to a 1995 La Mauny, which was all toasted oak and sunshine. And then I was offered a tour of the bar and wine cave, where the rarest rums were stashed. Here was a Depaz 1929, and there a La Favourite that saw 33 years in wood. (How, you may wonder, given that a barrel loses about 5% each year through evaporation? I saw the process, called ouillage, at one distillery – every so often, the entire contents of one year's aging is emptied from the barrels, blended together, then sealed back up in the same barrels – with a few empties left over.)

But most intriguing was a bottle kept high in an alcove in the wine cave. It was, according to my host, an unopened 1885 St. James. It was slumming, sitting next to other St. James bottles from 1939 and 1941. And the price? Well, it's not for sale. Yet. But I'll bet someone will eventually come along with a big enough wallet to pry off that cork.