The best fiction is the work of an author inventing characters. The best non-fiction is the work of an author exploring real characters in the process of inventing themselves. And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis probes and digs for the ways that rum has interacted with culture from the slave trade to its popular ascendancy as a drink today. What makes this book as exciting as a well-made daiquiri are the hundreds of characters and the ways that the participants influence and are influenced by their variety of drink inventions and the scene.In talking to Curtis, who lives on Peaks Island, he was skeptical of “The parlor game called the-small-object-influencing-the-world. I cast a net for the characters that appeared. It was kind of like soliciting the most interesting from all the chum that I threw overboard.”
While rum is often associated with swashbucklers and seaborne marauders, Curtis confessed that “It was difficult to find pirates actually writing about rum — it was more a Robert Louis Stevenson thing.” Among the memorable pieces of actual pirate and rum lore is Blackbeard moaning in his ship-captain’s log, “Such a day, Rum all out — Our company somewhat sober.” When it was available, he damned well knew what to do with it. He laced his drink with gunpowder, ignited it, and drank it all down in a fiery display. The rum image was so steeped with pirate lore that the Captain Morgan brand still uses the pirate as its mascot. After reading of the real adventures of the pirates, we could easily title this the “rum is not necessarily your friend chapter.”
The local pirates didn’t write of their rum adventures, but there is one delicious local marker celebrating the hanging of Thomas Bird (pirate and murderer) on June 25, 1790, at Congress Street and Macmillan Road in Portland.
An unexpected thing about this book is the reliving of your own stories while reading Curtis's. The chapter on the mai tai, that rum drink made famous by Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber, brings back every single Tiki God kava bowl with that straw umbrella sticking out (hell, he even has one on the cover). It also brought back an interview I once did with a major winemaker, who chose to meet at a Trader Vic’s restaurant. While we were trying to taste and talk about his wines, he went on about growing up in Oakland, California, and spending every great family event in Trader Vic’s. Then, he stopped in mid-sentence, called a wait person, and ordered two exotic rum potions that aren’t on the menu. “This was the stuff that the Trader reserved when he came into any of his restaurants.” We never did finish that interview, or taste his wines, such was the power of the potion.
One of my favorite characters appears in chapter 10: Stephen Remsberg, rum collector extraordinaire. Curtis interviewed him just before Katrina hit his house in New Orleans. Remsberg does not collect empties, but dwells on procuring full bottles of the rare and extinct of the rum species. “Steven Remsberg’s house might be regarded as the Louvre of Rum, that is, if the Louvre were built around a small kitchen, and then spilled into a small adjoining room with a thatched roof tiki bar.” Stephen houses the living memory of all ages and styles of rum. He doles out his precious collection an ounce at a time to aficionados like Curtis.
