A new day, a new name, another attempt at sucking philosophy down the neck of a bottle. This time though, there is inspiration and (wind and tide willing) focus. Sweet Sweet Whiskey we called ourselves, but that was then, in a land of corn and pigs and fresh water and smog. Now we come to a new, more spiritually compatible home, a place of salt and indolence, the capstone of the triangle trade, a little piece of the Caribbean flung erroneously far to the north. This is a land of rum, and it is of rum that I will write.
All melobelsa having now been excised, let me address you in a more natural tone. My name is Alec Boyle, a middling writer and accomplished drinker who finds myself recently relocated to the be-lighted shores of beautiful Rhode Island. I am under employed and over supplied and find myself with a lot on my mind. I spend a lot of time thinking about terroir, both my own and that of the things I consume, what it is and what it should be. I spend a lot of time thinking about localized economic specialization, specifically how it relates to the terroir of the things we consume. I spend a lot of time thinking about rum, and what it means to the past, present, and future of this place.
We live in a time of rapidly crumbling gastronomic barriers. Until about 20 years ago, it was a given that all the best wine came from France. Until about 10, that the best beer was from Germany. Until about 5, the best whiskey was all still from Scotland. Today we know that the French are only particularly good at making French wines, that the Belgians always made the best beer until the Americans decided to one up them, and that India and Japan are both perfectly capable of turning out exceptional single malts. What I have long suspected though is that all of this is just the beginning. My profound hope is that in the next 20 years we will come to see that all of this decaying perceptions were merely the result of a few unfortunate informational bottle-necks that cropped up over the last 1000 years or so, and that as a species of drinkers we are capable of so much more.
I recently met a man in Vermont who run a winery (include link). His winery produces exclusively fruit wines. For decades fruit wines have held relatively deserved reputation as the foremost front of America's war on glucose sensitivity. This man though made very very good fruit wines. Dry, balanced, accomplished wines. This man in Vermont
, he said a very profound thing to me, something which jived exceptionally well with a lot of unexpressed thoughts of my own over the years. What he said was that the Vermont was the Napa valley of the East, but that it was suited to the growing of stone fruit and apples than to grapes. And that, is a truly thrilling thought. Because America is an incredibly bounteous country. And every region of it has a thing that it is best at the growing and production of. And if human history has taught us anything, it is that if we can grow a thing, we can turn it into booze.
Which of course brings us to the obvious logical road block in my little thesis statement here: rum is made of sugar, in the form of either cane juice or mollases, and in no way does the growth of sugar cane or the production of mollasses occur anywhere in or near Rhode Island. But the people of Rhode Island, like so many inhabitants of resource poor islands before them, have commerce flowing in their veins. And rum is in many ways the ultimate expression of that commerce and terrible, delicious exploitation upon which it is built. I believe that going forward, rum has the potential to be great. I'll discuss exactly what I mean by greatness in a future article. For now though, lets just say that I believe it has the potential bring us a greater connection with our past, and to define entirely unknown bounries for our future.
As I go forward with this blog, I intend to explore all aspects of rum, from it's terrible past to middling present, to it's hopefully brilliant future. I hope that you will all enjoy that exploration as much as I will.
