Terroir Chutzpah: Renegade Rum "Pearls," Waterford "The Cuvée" Irish Single Malt Whisky reviews

If you've read spirits news anytime in the last 20 years then you've probably heard of Mark Reynier. This was the guy who bought and CEO'd a mothballed Bruichladdich from Whyte & Mackay 20-odd years ago and put it back into prominence with an endless barrage of new product lines, sometimes-successful wine finishes, and painfully bright packaging. He's got a wine background, whence the ex-wine maturation and - more recently - the focus on "terroir," what wine nerds call everything that sums up the effect of the "place" where the original materials are grown. And, ever since Rémy Cointreau bought Bruichladdich away from him in 2012, he's been working on a pair of projects laser-focused on that terroir thing: one's a whisky (not whiskey) distillery in southern Ireland, one's a rum distillery in Grenada. New and quite young releases from both have been trickling out and, predictably, they come in colorful packaging, wine cask maturation is involved (for the Waterfords right now, and for the Renegades to come), and there's lots of "terroir." They are also quite expensive.

Being a wine nerd myself I can't object to an emphasis on terroir, but I can very well be irked by the ways it's happening. Reynier and his projects often present themselves as if it had never occurred to anyone before them that the nature and quality of the grains or the cane matter - and indeed, in a Punch interview (https://punchdrink.com/articles/obses... ), as if no one had ever tried to make "profound" rum before. Rather than presenting a solid core range first and then deciding via experience what exceptional "crus" deserve their own separate bottling - you know, the way they do it in wine - they lead with the single-area bottles, exceptional terroir or not. Rather than using the native yeast found on the raw materials plus longer fermentations - as you would in old-world wine - yeast is pitched and ferments are relatively short. The rum is termed "pre-cask" (as if unaged rum were an oddity) and the whisky is written Scotch-style, in countries where rum is usually sold unaged and where whiskey is spelled with an e. It makes it far too easy to wonder if all the "terroir" talk is just a way to justify dropping lots of different collectible bottlings on the market at once... and, yes, then there's the pricing.

But what matters is what's in the glass and whether it delivers, and I went and bought a rum and an Irish whiskey - err, whisky - to find that out (your Patreon dollars at work). There are five "Pre-Cask" Renegades out and I wasn't going to buy all of them, so I grabbed the Pearls harvested from cane right around the distillery. You can read all about it here: https://renegaderum.com/canecode/pre-.... For the Waterford I grabbed the newish "The Cuvée," blended from their Single Farm Origins series. And here's your reading on that: https://waterfordwhisky.com/teireoir/.... So how did they do?

Renegade Cane Rum "Pre-Cask" Single Farm Origin: Pearls (Upper Pearl, Grenada; harvested from Yellow Lady cane at Pearls Farm, Jan. 25-29 2021, pot-distilled Jan. 29-30 2021; 3942 bottles; 50% ABV), 85+/100
Waterford Irish Single Malt Whisky "The Cuvée" (Waterford, Ireland; NAS on bottle, 4 years old on website; bottled 2021, 40k bottles produced; nonchillfiltered, 50% ABV), 84+/100

So yeah, they're okay! The Cuvée is a lovely grains-and-s'mores young malt, and the Pearls is a pleasantly green, lighter cane juice rum that reminds me of pot-still cachaça. You buy either of these and you're getting something tasty and well-made.

The real problem is when you're aware of what else is out there. The Renegade may be nice, but it's absolutely buried by the stuff made at Rivers Antoine just north (review here:    • Barbosa Grogue and Rivers Royal Grenadian ...   ) - Rivers being not only a better rum but more distinctive and, dare I say, more expressive of the Grenadian terroir. Meanwhile Waterford doesn't have to deal with any neighbors long-fermenting with native yeast, but to my palate this Cuvée still isn't better or even any more distinctive of Irish terroir than what you can get cheaper from other distilleries in Ireland - from Dingle, say, if you wanted to stick to the little guys (review here:    • I Love/Hate Irish Whiskey, II: Dingle Sing...   ), or even from the big industrial estates.

Will be better in the future, but out-QPR'd for now. Outside of the fun of buying every single bottle and comparing them - surprise, different raw materials will create different distillates - I think the main reasons to buy these today are the marketing and the personality of Mark Reynier. Which is basically the opposite of selling on "terroir."

Extra special thanks to my Different Spirits on Patreon (  / differentspirits  ) -

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