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.