Just joined the list -- and can't resist jumping right in. On the subject of St. James, my impression from having lived some years in Martinique was that you could ascribe a little more honesty to their labels than some of the other distilleries. On the other hand, they weren't big on the millesimes. Most of what you could get was labelled as 'over xxx years old' etc. Again, just recollection, but I think they gave up the millesimes because they were earlier than the others in becoming market-driven and becoming an 'export' distillery on the high end. Just can't deliver the millesimes in enough volume, and keep the quality stable. Impressions could be wrong, and I'd be interested in hearing a confirmation (or not). On barrels. In the early 90's most of St. James aging barrels came from Jack Daniels. The story I heard on the tour was that JD bought fresh oak barrels and kept them only about 3-4 years. St. James would then keep them around another 5-10 years. They admitted that as the barrels aged, the quality dropped, and at the end they were used for Rhum paille, and then discarded. I am sure Mr Scheer would have found a good number of bad barrels there. As long as you burned out the barrels every year, they said, the barrels would still serve to take the bite out of the white rum and give it color. As long as the rum mellowed, that was key. It must have made good business sense, but an old bourbon barrel and an old wine barrel are bound to impart different qualities to a well-aged rum, and a refined nose should tell the difference. What says the list?
