Compared to the worlds of wine and whisky, rum has a tendency to be viewed slightly differently. Someone looking to change this and lean on the importance of terroir and provenance is former Bruichladdich head Mark Reynier, with Renegade Rum in Grenada.
Setting his sights on rum after two decades of developing whisky, Renegade Rum’s philosophy was part strategic but also part accidental. On the one hand, Reynier’s approach for Renegade dates back seven years, and he answered the basic questions pretty quickly; sugarcane not molasses, and traditional pot stills not columns. These would enable him to shine all the light on the terroir of spirits and Grenada’s stand-out conditions. But this is where the first big problem arose.
No one in Grenada wanted to farm sugar cane. After three years of searching, Reynier adopted the ‘if you need something doing, do it yourself’ mantra and began growing across an array of areas. This unplanned step into farming meant Reynier could use a diverse range of terroirs and microclimates and keep precision tracking over the provenance, with the ‘cane code’ on every bottle logging every production detail you can think of.
With the philosophy and methods of winemakers and the expertise of single malt distilleries, Renegade has evolved into a terroir study of rum, and more precisely the building blocks of sugar cane. Each Étude bottle, their first aged rum, displays a single terroir of cane that went into it, be that from New Bacolet or Pearls.
Both were aged in premium French and American oak before being bottled at 55% ABV but have subtly different offerings. New Bacolet is filled with deep, dried fruits and sweet oak, whereas Pearls is rounded with less fruit and more cinnamon oak spice. We’re intrigued to see where this laser focus on rum terroir goes, and what other mouth-watering open-book bottles come out of it!
The small-scale bottlings of Étude have now rolled out across the world, you can visit Renegade Rum’s site for way more information on their fascinating work here and if you’re interested in investing in a cask then this is where to head!