Have tasted most of the rums made in the Caribbean but have to admit I had never heard of El Dorado or the Guayana distillery. Years ago a 12 year old rum was considered a premium drink but nowadays everyone is cranking out 21 year old stuff. In the past premium rums originated in Barbados, Cuba or Puerto Rico and the other Islands were considered to produce 2nd tier stuff some only suited to clean your driveway. Still remember some 35 years ago Cruzan Rum at $1 a fifth in St Thomas. Nowadays with modern processes all it takes is an adequate investment to set a up a distillery in a tax haven and produce a quality product. The advertisement indicates El Dorado 21 is a blended rum and I wonder where the different blends may originate from...
Same thing is happening in the single malt and bourbon industries. Have you seen the prices? Single Malts? They don't mean single barrel They are free, under the law, to blend different whiskies from the same distillery to attain a consistent product. And there is a system of trading with other distilleries. So single malts are pretty close to being blended anyway. There are so many varieties of bourbon, in name, and in technique, aging it's very hard to tell about value. Small barrel, small batch, straight. And there are the small craft distilleries, who start out as marketing entities since it takes a while to produce real product. And that might not be any good. But it takes years to find out.
There's a book,
Tasting Whiskey, written by Lew Bryson who writes about .... whiskey. It's a very interesting book the covers the making of whiskey, the business of whiskey, the politics of whiskey making, history of whiskey, the unique regions of whiskey making and a lot more. Rum is a spirit but I don't think it's a whiskey. Whiskey has to be made from grain and aged in wood barrels.
So I'll keep tasting and see if I can sort it out. And, of course, report my findings.
