On the north-eastern side of Grenada stands Renegade Rum Distillery. A modern marvel and environmentally pioneering, it is designed perfectly to distil one terroir at a time of fresh sugar cane juice only in order to produce a vast array of distinct cane rum distillates, each one unique and compelling in its own right.

We either explore them individually – with terroir precision, as an Étude; or we can layer them – the cuvée concept – to create natural rums of extraordinary complexity.

Ours is an industry-changing project from Mark Reynier, who has over four decades of experience in the drinks industry. Half in wine, as a former wine importer and merchant; and half in spirits, from the renaissance of Islay’s Bruichladdich single malt whisky and The Botanist gin, to Ireland’s groundbreaking, multi award-winning terroir-driven Waterford Distillery.

All of this experience is being applied to rum: wine methodology with whisky know-how.

Our home is Grenada, a quiet corner of the Caribbean, a volcanic island of progressive people. Standing in the face of the trade winds, this Windward island off the South American coast presents a rich and diverse set of conditions ideal for our project. A hilly, volcanic terrain provides a wide range of altitudes, soils and microclimates ideal for growing superior terroir-derived cane. The flavour potential is diverse, to say the least.

Most rum is made from molasses, the waste by-product from sugar manufacture. Only a small percentage comes directly from sugar cane itself. Rather than the ubiquitous, we wanted the extraordinary: the primary source of rum’s natural flavour: that means cane.

In 2015 we established our agricultural company CaneCo to reintroduce seven varieties island-wide adapted to the various soils, altitudes and microclimates, for despite a long history of sugar cane cultivation it had been all but abandoned. Grenada provided us with a blank canvas; a challenge, but also an opportunity to start afresh; today we work across over a dozen farms around the island, each providing us with distinctive terroirs and flavours that we can capture in spirit.

Terroir provides us with our building blocks. The French wine term terroir – there is no direct English translation – refers to the interaction between the soil, microclimate and place on a vine or any growing plant. Starting from scratch we had the chance to identify a wide variety of terroirs throughout the island from exposed, sandy, volcanic soils to low-lying alluvial ones nestled between rivers, each one influencing how our cane grows and the flavours we can derive from it.

Provenance, and its validating accompaniment ‘traceability’, are essential to distilling a terroir-driven rum. Huge logistics are required to guarantee total integrity of each parcel, to keep it separate from field to barrel, so the distillery has been designed and calibrated precisely for this purpose. It enables us to discover the island’s character, to capture the essence of Grenada in spirit, and prove what we say. This manifests in our CaneCode, an example of which can be seen here.

After harvest, each terroir of sugar cane arrives at the distillery within hours for freshness: it is then milled on our bespoke cane mill, fermented in our ‘wine rack’ of horizontal, thermoregulated wash backs, and distilled in either a pot still or small batch column still manufactured by the famous stillmakers Fortsyths, Scotland. Each terroir of rum is then matured in the highest calibre American and French oak, virgin and first fill, to provide us with harmony. Though some of our cane rums we have shared in Pre-Cask form, maturation takes place on site to breathe the salt-laden trade winds.

The distillery is also environmentally pioneering. While the science of distillation is over a thousand years old here the latest thinking includes generating our own electricity from the waste cane bagasse at near perfect combustion levels; and utilising a radical waste water system including phytoremediation to treat the vinasse, thus creating a positive contribution to the local mangroves and the biome.

Our rum is natural in colour as in texture, unsweetened and unchillfiltered. We may enjoy them as Études – terroir-precision. But assembled together the cuvée concept – cane on cane, terroir on terroir, distillation method on distillation method, cask on cask – they layer to create the ultimate in complexity, beguiling and profound natural rums.

And in this way, with wine methodology and whisky know-how, we hope to demonstrate that rum can indeed be taken even more seriously than the greatest single malts on the planet.