Some details from my last trip to the island of Marie Galante in the French Caribbean’s:
Marie Galante is located south of Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean, It's a small island, about 61 square miles. To give you some proportions, it's about one tenth the size of Guadeloupe.
You can reach Marie Galante either by boat or small planes; there's a tiny airport. It takes about an hour to get there using a ferry-type boat. Depending on who you ask and when, there are between 10,000 and 15,000 people living on this little island. In contrast, Guadeloupe has about 400,000 people, and Martinique around 350,000.
Marie Galante is super flat, with no hills or mountains, unlike Guadeloupe and Martinique. The soil on Marie Galante is mostly chalk, while it tends to be clay in Guadeloupe. The sun is beaming on the island all day, everyday.
As a result Marie Galante is known as the last sugarcane island in the Caribbean because in terms of surface area planted with sugarcane relative to the total island area, it has the most sugarcane of all the Caribbean - about 20% - when Guadeloupe is at about 7% (Martinique clocks in around 3%).
Historically, Marie Galante's trade was initially cotton, coffee, and indigo, but very quickly shifted to mainly sugarcane. The soil is pristine; there's never been an extensive culture of bananas here, which on other islands often involves heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides. The locals consider their soil as close to organic as possible, comparable only to Haiti.
There are 5 distilleries on island making the island in the French Caribbean's with the most distilleries per square miles:
- Grande Anse is the large industrial facility
- Bellevue the largest artisanal players
- Bielle
- then Poisson which makes the brand Pere Labat
- and RhumRhum (micro distillery, initially operating within Bielle and since 2021 at Pere Labat).
Zooming in on the Distillerie Poisson, started in 1860, the smallest of 5 located on the island of Marie Galante:
Distillerie Poisson (Poisson = "fish" in French) makes the brand Pere Labat.
The distillery was purchased in 2007 by J.C. Brot, who was born and raised in a family with a long history in Guadeloupe and Marie Galante proper. Culturally, on these islands, making rum is seen as a high achievement and JC always dreamed of being a rhum maker.
The distillery employs 17 people and manages about 250 hectares of land, some of which is cultivated with cane that feeds the distillery, while much of the cane is bought from small planters to maintain good relationships with the local Planteurs.
Being a French territory, working hours are highly regulated (35hr/week, 5 weeks off per year).
The teams is working from 7am to 1pm Mondays to Fridays and 7am to noon on Saturdays.
Distillation occurs from Feb to July.
The facility is not large or glamorous; it's rusty, it's beat-up, it experiences a lot of daily operational challenges which causes frequent repairs and maintenance issues. Despite these conditions, the distillery continues to produce super high-quality booze, experimenting with aging in various types of casks, including ground cru white Burgundy and Mouton etc...
The fermentation process lasts 72 hours and is inoculated. The 2 "Creoles" columns, one from 1955 the other from 1977 are all copper and consist of 15 plates - 11 stripping plates and four concentrating plates. White rhum flows out of the stills at 70.7% alcohol by volume and eventually entering casks at around 63%.
The distillery makes about 1,500 liters of booze per day and sells about 40K cases a year (3/4 to the French market, the rest sold internationally).
The distillery's operation is deeply intertwined with the local community; some planteurs have scheduled appointments to deliver their cane, other randomly show up. The unpredictable supply of sugar cane from the small local planteurs reflects the totally artisanal nature of its production.
The island's hot (temp typically varies between 74 and 95 F) and humid conditions contribute to about 7+% annual evaporation in casks, more than twice the evaporation typical in the Cognac or Armagnac regions of mainland France.