The Rum University Library 2
French Rum: A History 1639-1902 by Marco and Claudio Pierini
French Rum History
(Author’s Review) I have been studying the History of Rum in the West and in particular its Origins for years. You can read my articles on the magazine GOT RUM? - www.gotrum.com - and on my own web site: www.therumhistorian.com
I soon realized that it was necessary to deal with the very origin of spirits in general. According to the (few) scholars that studied this issue, the shift of alcohol from a drug to a beverage and the commercial production and consumption of distilled alcoholic beverages, spirits, occurred in Europe (England and the Netherlands) only around 1650.
Perhaps the most authoritative description of this scholarly consensus is an essay of the economic historian John McCusker: “The business of distilling in the Old World and the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…”
My own research brought me to question this statement and now I can state that, with the due respect due to a great scholar, McCusker was wrong: in the West, the commercial production of spirits happened in Italy before 1450. Then, it spread quickly in France and all over Europe.
Realizing that a real production and consumption of spirits already existed in France, before America was discovered made me reconsider my favorite subject, the origins of rum. A new, intriguing question came to my mind: did the French settlers in the Antilles really have to wait for the English settlers in Barbados before they tried their hand at fermenting and distilling the by-products of sugarcane?
Preliminary research on the French Caribbean showed me that actually, in the race to grow sugar and produce rum, the French and the English Caribbean settlers got to the finishing line together and that both learnt from Portuguese Brazil. I also realized with surprise that the French produced a lot of rum in the 1600s.
At that point I tried to understand what had happened later and I discovered that the history of French rum is as fascinating as it is relatively unknown. And with the help of my son Claudio, we decided to tell this story.
File Size: 3023 KB
Publication Date: March 4, 2020
Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B085HXB8S3