Tasting: Lucia Duque Rum

Take a moment to scan the store shelves today for a new and much-hyped rum being launched amid one of the most expensive marketing campaigns I've ever seen. Lucia Duque Rum formally rolls out today — available in white, gold, and anejo.

But don't look on the liquor shelves. It's stocked only in the magazine racks. In the current Rolling Stone (on shelves September 7), there’s a splashy ad for Duque rum with a sealed pouch that allows you to taste a nonalcoholic “rum mojito” made with Duque.

Duque Rum is part of a clever campaign to advertise Cane, a new CBS series revolving around the complicated doings of a family of Cuban exiles growing sugar and making rum in Florida. (I’m thinking: Dallas, with sugar replacing oil.) As far as I know, it’s the second fictional rum coming out of Florida in recent months. Bacardi’s Havana Club, which premiered earlier this year as a spin-off of a complicated court case, was, of course, the first.

I was hoping to taste the Duque rum mojito today via the proprietary “multi-sensory marketing” technology (an upgrade of the old scratch ‘n sniff), and see if any rum taste comes through. But I read that the “Peel ‘n Taste” flavor pack is being included only in Rolling Stone editions sold in New York and Los Angeles. Ah, well, and here I am in Maine.

I did explore the very impressive site at www.luciaduquerum.com — and, seriously, this could be any upscale rum website, complete with the requirement that you enter your birthdate to proceed, and full of shots of improbably beautiful but vapid young people enjoying rum at those parties you and I are never invited to. The site features a very professional ad (grizzled men hacking at sugar cane with machetes; labeled bottles rolling off a production line), a serviceable mojito recipe, and a (real) call for a Duque spokesmodel — apparently this is an actual contest and the winner gets to appear on a future episode.

This all raises a couple of questions. Can an actual Duque rum far behind? With all the millions of dollars spent on building brand awareness, it seems a little silly to let it go to waste. I haven’t seen any reference to a licensing agreement anywhere (yet). But who knows?

And what’s up with the “rum mojito”? Is this to distinguish it from the “vodka mojito”? Perhaps Absolut is behind the whole campaign, clearing brandspace to invade the popular mojito market.

It’s just so hard to tell what’s real these days.

Lucia Duque Rum