Brands: Next Rum Giant?

Last July, Alexandre Gabriel, CEO and majority owner of spirits producer Maison Ferrand, spent several days at a cocktail and spirits convention in New Orleans. “I had a big smile the whole time,” he says. “People thought I was drunk.”

He wasn’t. What put him in a buoyant mood was knowing that a few days afterward, he would fly to Jamaica for the re-opening of the Long Pond rum distillery—“one of the iconic distilleries of Jamaica,” he says—which had been shuttered and gathering dust for five years. Better still, he’d be attending as part-owner, having quietly acquired a one-third share last spring, as part of his company’s purchase of West Indies Rum Distillery in Barbados. “For me, it’s like being able to rejuvenate a cathedral,” he says.

Long Pond, located in northwest Jamaica, traces its roots back to 1753, when it was part of an extensive sugar plantation. The distillery went through a cavalcade of owners, both public and private, including Seagram Limited, which bought it in 1953. The Jamaican government acquired it in 1977 and then sold it and bought it back again as part of National Rums of Jamaica, a government entity formed to keep troubled rum distilleries afloat.

That’s how Gabriel’s acquisition came into play. But his story starts across the globe in France.

In 1989, then a business student undertaking research on the spirits industry, Gabriel came upon Maison Ferrand, a family owned distillery that was essentially defunct but still held a good store of aging stocks. He partnered with the family to sell the Cognac and breathe life back into the estate, reviving the distillery and adding a gin to the company’s portfolio.

He also began assertively hunting down other French artisanal spirits, including calvados, to acquire by the barrel that he would bottle and market. Starting in 2003, he looked beyond France to the Caribbean, creating Plantation Rum, to seek out top-flight rums and ship them to Europe for blending and further aging in used Cognac casks. “I really fell in love with rum” he says. “There’s so much to explore.”

One of the Caribbean distilleries from which he’d acquired rum intrigued him. “West Indies Rum was like the sleeping beauty,” he says, referring to West Indies Rum Distillery, a historic facility located on the  outskirts of Bridgetown, Barbados. It was owned by Goddard Enterprises, a conglomerate with auto dealerships, pharmacies, and shipping companies, among other interests.