The Haitian earthquake was what greeted me when I got online this morning.
Haiti has never had it easy and the last few years have been especially rough. The country has had to deal with the Gonaive floods, that horrible school collapse in Port-au-Prince, the political strife and social anarchy that followed the ouster of Aristide and led to Haiti playing host to a UN peacekeeping deployment, and now this earthquake. It’s too early to say how bad this earthquake really is. Maybe the casualties are light. Probably they run into the thousands. Key government buildings in Port-au-Prince have collapsed, and the devastation is almost certainly far worse in the shoddily built slums that dominate the city. Life in Haiti is difficult even at its best, and this latest event is simply tragic.
Now seems an appropriate time to mention a couple of things about my visit to Haiti that I somehow never got around to writing about earlier. . . Read the rest of this entry »
Far too late, I am finally throwing together a mini-account of my Guatemala trip. The last year has been somewhat messy, hence the lack of blogging. For some reason Guatemala was hard to write about (perhaps because I did amazingly little while there) leading to my blog getting stuck in Haiti. Anyway, I need to write something about Guatemala before I can move on to the more interesting subject of Havana. Read the rest of this entry »
While passing through Panama’s very pleasant airport en route from Haiti to Guatemala I picked up a sample pack of Nicaragua’s Flor de Caña rum. While I had heard lots of good things about this rum I had never really tried it.
One place I very much wanted to visit in Haiti was the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince. Haiti no longer sees many tourists, but back in the day it rivaled Cuba as a Caribbean playground. The Hotel Oloffson, dubbed the “Greenwich Village of the Tropics”, saw all kinds of famous visitors, many of an artistic bent. In particular, Graham Greene was a regular at the hotel. The Comedians, Greene’s novel about Duvalier’s Haiti, immortalized the Oloffson as the fictional Hotel Trianon.I dropped by the Hotel Oloffson while taking a look around downtown Port-au-Prince. Port-au-Prince is not a nice city, so the Oloffson was a pleasant retreat in which to while away part of the afternoon.
While in Haiti I spent around a week in Cap-Haitien. Cap-Haitien was the nicest part of my visit to Haiti, being more pleasant, relaxed and interesting than Port-au-Prince. I stayed in the atmospheric old Hotel Roi-Christophe, parts of which apparently date back to the 18th Century. There was a serious oil shortage during my visit, the result of the road to Port-au-Prince having been cut by the storms and floods that had all but destroyed the city of Gonaive. The combination of the oil shortage and the nearby humanitarian disaster lent the city an air of crisis. There was no electricity, and nightfall saw UN patrols rumble through pitch-black streets. The hotel bar was a rare oasis of light, drawing in aid workers who sat around drinking beers and planning sorties to Gonaive. Even that oasis of light tottered on the brink of being extinguished. With no fuel available in Cap-Haitien, the hotel manager was forced to drive to the Dominican Republic border just to buy fuel to keep things going for another couple of days.
Barbancourt is an interesting distillery. Calling the House of Barbanourt eccentric would be a stretch, but it is definitely an anomaly in the rum world. Standing out as it does from the pack, Barbancourt attracts more than its share of controversy. While few deny that Barbancourt produces delicious and quality rums, some question the raw materials used.
The marketing blurb goes that Barbancourt distills exclusively from fermented fresh sugar cane juice, following the seasonal rhythms of the sugar cane harvest to produce a Haitian version of Martinique’s famous agricole rums. However, some say Barbancourt takes a less discriminating approach, feeding its fermenting vessels and stills with sugar syrup and molasses during the seasons when fresh sugar cane juice is unavailable, producing a delicious but odd hybrid that is quite unlike the rums of Martinique. Through visiting the distillery I hoped to learn about how Barbancourt is made, what makes it unique, and where it fits in comparison to other rums.
In Haiti I was surprised to find all sorts of obscure products bearing the Barbancourt name. Besides the well known Barbancourt rums there was a comprehensive range of Barbancourt liqueurs, and a rum called Berling, also produced by Barbancourt. In fact, most of these ‘Barbancourt’ products have nothing to do with the internationally famous Rhum Barbancourt. Haiti has two rum and spirits producers, both legitimately using the Barbancourt name.
Who knew that Grand Marnier oranges came from Haiti? I sometimes worry about my level of obscure booze related knowledge, but until I visited Cap-Haitien I had no idea Haiti was the leading source of fine orange flavors in French liqueurs. Grand Marnier, Cointreau and Marie Brizard all rely on Haiti for their bitter orange needs.
Barbancourt in a coconut on the beach, an excellent reason to visit Haiti.
Strangely though, I only tried Barbancourt once before visiting Haiti*. I first tasted Barbancourt while in Cambodia, a trip on which I seem to have tried a lot of interesting products. For a small and poor country Cambodia has a surprisingly good selection of imported booze. This must say something about the type of foreigner Cambodia attracts. In any case, that Cambodian taste of Barbancourt made a big impression. I do not recall which of the Barbancourt products it was (probably the 5 Star), but it tasted unlike any other rum I had tried.
On my trip to Haiti I wanted to see what Barbancourt products were available there, which ones were popular, and how the locals drank their rum. I also wanted to visit the Barbancourt distillery and learn more about how Barbancourt rum is produced. I will write about the Barbancourt distillery later. For now lets just look at the rum.
While in the Dominican Republic I spotted a magazine article saying that Bermudez rums were in the process of being launched in the United States for the first time. The Bermudez rums are pretty good. The Bermudez Aniversario 1852 ended up being the bottle I took out of the country with me. Yes, I even picked it over the Brugal Extra Viejo!
I have no idea if Bermudez will be made available throughout the whole of the United States. The article only mentions North Carolina. What do I know anyway? Perhaps Bermudez has been available in the U.S. for years and a new distributor is simply creating some publicity for themselves?
However, just in case there is somebody in the United States who read about Bermudez rum on this blog, wants Bermudez rum, and cannot find Bermudez rum, here are the contact details of the importer:
C&R Imports
(919) 272-4165
pereza@cnrimports.com
Maybe somebody can import this stuff to New Zealand?
