Santa Teresa

The German immigrant Gustav Julius Vollmer arrived in 1830; his son Gustavo Julio Vollmer, whose mother was a cousin of Simon Bolivar, bought the Hacienda Santa Teresa and turned to sugarcane. He bought European stills in 1896 and registered the name Ron Santa Teresa in 1909. It is Venezuela's first registered distillery and the fourth-oldest registered company of any kind in the country, on land where Bolivar ratified the abolition of slavery in 1818. By the 1950s Santa Teresa held about 80 percent of the Venezuelan market.

In the mid-2000s, after a gang member attacked a member of the distillery's security staff, CEO Alberto Vollmer offered him a choice: hand him to the police, or work unpaid at the distillery for a few months. He chose the work, stayed, and drew in others. Soon Vollmer employed dozens of members of rival gangs, using rugby to teach discipline and channel anger. Project Alcatraz now combines vocational training, education and psychological support, and has been recognised by the World Bank and studied at Harvard.

The distillery, an hour southwest of Caracas in Aragua state, has run column stills since 1905, when a sugar refinery still stood on site. Its four-column system makes 80,000 litres a day in two marques: a 75 percent heavy rum from the first column alone, and a 95 percent light rum through all four, both off a fast 14-hour continuous fermentation. In 1988 the house reinstated a small steam-jacketed pot still, used for its flagship 1796. The molasses is pasteurised, and the heavy rum gets a long batch fermentation.

The flagship 1796 is the product of a dedicated solera warehouse: 540 Limousin oak casks that have not been emptied since the system started in 1992. Rum for bottling is drawn from one section, never more than half a cask, which is then refilled from another section, and the last section topped up with a blend of light, heavy and pot-still rums aged from 4 to 35 years. The result tastes almost nothing like the rest of the Santa Teresa range, a depth the source credits more to the pot stills than to the solera itself.

The anchor is Santa Teresa 1796, by far the most reviewed bottle of the house and the one to start with. The extra-anejo Linaje steps up from the everyday Gran Reserva, while independent bottlers occasionally release single casks like the Rum Shark Salto Angel that score higher still. Santa Teresa's rums lean drier and less sweetened than some Venezuelan peers, with 1796 the standout.