Hello! It's the first day of December which means the countdown to Christmas has begun. The countdown to Christmas did not begin in November no matter how much you wanted it to, sorry. I decided to buy an advent calendar this year and ended up with one made of decent rum. I just got done investigating the first one, so here are my thoughts.
Bit of an intro
I was looking for an advent calendar and of course I was looking for a chocolate one. I quickly encountered a problem however, when I discovered that the only ones available in the supermarket were very cheap. I've made the mistake of buying a cheap chocolate advent calendars before. ne year I had one that I would dread having to open and invite people over every day to try to give them the chocolate. it wasn't long before my friends cottoned on and refused to come to my house in case I forced the grim chocolate on them. The advent calendars in the supermarket cost half as much as that one, so I decided to pass up the chance to meet the ghost of Christmas disappointment and look elsewhere. I wandered down to the government alcohol dispensary to see about some Christmas whisky and spotted several of the 25 sample selection boxes by the checkout. They had rum, gin, I think aquavit. Rum seemed like the right choice since I've been meaning to explore rum as a whisky alternative but haven't really managed to make much headway. It's a risk to spend 500 kroners on something you don't know enough about to decide if it's worth it, but 25 decent quality rums (I've heard of a few of them so I know there are some ok ones) for the price of a bottle of good whisky seems ok.
Day one is Mount Gay XO Reserve from Barbados. I've been trying to find out about it, but it hasn't been easy. Because I'm not as familiar with rum I'm not certain what a the jargon is about. Mount Gay is the distillery and it was founded in Barbados in 1703. I gather it's the oldest distillery in the world. I assume it's named after a mountain called Mount Gay, which is a little unfortunate. In 1703 it didn't mean what it does now, so the meaning is more like Mount Joyful. The mountain has sugar cane growing all over it and apparently has coral stone soil that makes the sugar cane special in some way. XO stands for "Extra Old" which I have to say I think is a little silly. It refers to a rum that's been barrel aged for a minimum of six years. Other age classifications are VS meaning "Very Special" referring to a minimum of 2 years of aging, and VSOP meaning "Very Special Old Pale" referring to a minimum of 4 years. These don't seem very old for the standard age classifications for a whole industry, but bear in mind that countries that make rum tend to be rather more tropical than the highlands and they'll be losing product to evaporation much quicker, plus the way the spirit interacts with the wood will be different. I gather Mount Gay XO Reserve is aged between 8 and 15 years, so the XO classification really is a minimum of 6 years, not only 6 years. I heard that spirits aged in the Caribbean age about three times faster than in colder climates, so the amount of weed interaction in this rum is roughly equivalent of a scotch whisky aged for 24-45 years. I don't think it's the same thing though, there are a lot of odd things that affect the way a spirit interacts with a cask that aren't obvious.
This 20ml sample was bottled at 43% ABV, which I assume is the minimum legal strength although I don't know for sure. It's a decent strength and should be holding a good bit of flavour. I'm not sure about legal minimums, but about 40% seems to be standard for rum. Since Mount Gay aging longer than the minimum to call is XO and bottling at a slightly higher strength than minimum, I'm stating to develop high expectations for a lot of interesting flavours.
What more to say? I don't think they can legally add any colouring to rum in Barbados, and I'm fairly sure they don't use chill filtration which all seems lovely. The box of rums, which contains 25 20ml samples, making 50cl alltogether, which is less than the standard 70cl a bottle of rum contains. It cost me 795.90 Norwegian kroners. That's £62.28, $89.82, €74.95 or 179.63 Barbadian dollars.
Packaging
You've already seen the front of the box of rums. Just scroll up for another look at that. It's a black box with 25 rums written on the front. Typical packaging for something designed to be a gif if you ask me, but nothing wrong with that as long as the thing inside is something you want. The front of the box opens like a door and on the inside is another door. Nice and advent calendary so far. Opening little cardboard doors is what advent is all about. See if you can spot the problem though:
No more doors
That's right, there are no more doors to open. What kind of advent calendar doesn't have a door for every day? I suspect it's one that's actually just a gift box with a selection of rums and was never intended to be an advent calendar and that's only an advent calendar because David says it is. Ah well, I'll just have to consider ear bottle top a door. The inside of the first door seemed worth a picture so I'll include that.
Marketing fluff
It pretty much says it's a selection of decent rums, phrased in a marketing fluff kind of way. They describe the rum selection as "inspiring", "bold", "well travelled" etc, which isn't information. It's words designed to evoke certain feelings and make you think you've got something good. It makes me want to go into marketing so can replace this kind of fluffy nonsense with "This is a box of rum".Let's see the actual rum sample at last.
It's tiny
The bottle is tiny. I suppose any bottle with a capacity of 20ml is going to be tiny. It's quite cute though. There's very little information on the label which is understandable because it's no bigger than a postage stamp. It has a bit number one of the side, but I didn't get a picture of that. I actually think it's quite a cute bottle and I'm trying to think of ideas for what to do with them all. I'll probably give them to my godson, he's 5 and likes that kind of thing. Obviously I'll drink the rum first. I don't have much to say about the label design. It has the name, the logo's ok. If it didn't have "gay" written on it in big letters it might be better. I just feel weird asking for it in a bar although not so weird that I wouldn't do it. In fact I have done at least once. It was a cheaper version, but went great with the cigar I was smoking with my old friend Mr. Tiffen.
Smell in the bottle
On opening
Superglue
Sweet, fruity
I didn't bother taking too much time to smell it in the bottle. With just one serving there's not going to be any change in flavour once the air gets in the bottle or anything. It does smell pretty different in the tiny little bottle though.
Appearance
The bottle is very small and he colour of the liquid inside look like a lighter colour than it would in a larger bottle just because you're looking though a smaller depth of liquid. A bit like how looking through ten feet of water looks blue and looking though ten inches of water looks totally clear, or how a window is clear an a block of glass looks green. It actually looks darker in the glass than the bottle.
Darkish amber
It's not hugely dark. The problem with assessing the colour is that rum colours range from perfectly clear white rums to really, really dark brown dark rums. This looks pretty much like a sherry aged scotch whisky. I'm calling it darkish amber.
Neat
Nose
Superglue.
Spicy sweetness.
Hint of rich, dark, organic earthiness. Compost almost, along with the spicy sweetness.
Toffee-ish molasses.
Sour fruity note.
Sake. I'm sure everyonealready knows but that's Japanese rice wine.
Over ripe fruit.
Arrival
Not a big arrival.
Reminded me of cigar smoke a bit, like when you first light a cuban cigar.
Bit juicy.
Development
Dark dried fruits.
Dark chocolate.
Finish
Someting very familiar. Maybe lychee? Some kind of fruit. Grape?
Cola maybe.
Complex, hard to identify things.
Water - just a few drops
Nose
No so much superglue now.
Rich toffee molasses base with top notes of fragrant spice.
Complex, raisiny, dark dried fruit.
Over ripe banana.
Touch of leather.
That familiar thing from the finish when it was neat. That lychee-ish fruity thing.
Maybe prune.
Citrus, sweet, lemon rind.
Sweet spice, maybe clove and/or cinnamon, but very subtle. Maybe nutmeg too.
Sweet cinnamon and raisin reminiscent of chelsea buns
Some kind of fizzy drink. Ralfy mentioned Tizer in a review of Mount Gay XO (possibly a different one) and I although it's been a while since I had Tizer I think that might be the one.
Maybe cherry Coco-Cola.
Bit of cherry with chocolate, made me think black forest gateau.
Vanilla, sweet vanilla.
Stewed apple with a pinch of cinnamon.
Arrival
Sweet and smooth.
Jaffa Cake, cake part but after you've already eaten the orange bit.
Subtle.
Stewed apple.
Development
Cola cubes? Cola flavour boiled sweets.
Dark chocolate.
Woodiness to it, dryish, tanniny oaky.
Jaffa Cake with the orange bit.
Leather.
Spices, vanilla, cinnamon.
Finish
Mint? Hint of something cooling.
Dark chocolate.
Hint of leather.
Light fruit juice. Kind of lychee, but more complex.
Faint suggestion of tobacco.
A few extra comments
This spirit was complex. There were a lot of smells and tastes that I couldn't identify, just hints of familiar things emerging and then disappearing. I find some rums to be mostly sweet, with a couple of the cheapest ones I've tasted being pretty much brown sugar flavoured alcohol, but this had so much going on. The advantage of tiny bottles is you can get a lot different samples for the money. The disadvantage of only having a tiny bottle is that I only had 20 ml to explore this spirit. There was a lot going on and it felt like there were flavours and smells that I would identify if I just a little more time and a little more rum. It's not a negative point. Essentially I want more.
Conclusion
What a fantastic start to an advent calendar. I think even a cheap, nasty rum sample would beat a standard advent calendar chocolate, but this rum blew the dirty chocolate out of the water like the British fleet against a flimsy canoe. I just realized I this is my first nautical reference in a rum review. The next one is going to have to be fully pirate themed. The standard one to ten scale doesn't apply perfectly to tiny rum samples, so the best I'm going to be able to do is to say that I want more of this rum. The complexity and balance of the smells and flavours here was pretty spectacula. I want more time with this rum. I had a little look at the price for a 70cl bottle and although not cheap I think it would be well worth it. If the rest of the rums in the box are this good I'm going to be a very happy man by Christmas.
Hope you enjoyed that. I have no idea what tomorrow's rum sample will be. Well, it'll be rum but that's obvious. As tempting as it is to look in the box I'm not going to until tomorrow. Cheerio.
No comments:
Post a Comment