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.