Versailles 1985 11 Year Old 6004378

Versailles 1985 Velier 11 Year Old Sherry Wood

Velier was founded by Casimir Chaix in Genoa in 1947 as a wine and spirits importer and distributor. By the 1980s they were still a small family-company with less than ten staff. This all changed in 1986 when it was purchased by Luca Gargano, a former brand ambassador for Saint James who was at the time still in his twenties. Under his direction, they selected their first single cask whiskies in 1992, and their first rum in 1996. In the decades that followed, Velier have gone on to become one of the most collectible brands in the industry, and Gargano has positioned them as the one of the foremost authorities and bottlers of rum anywhere in the world.

Velier's earliest Demerara releases were bottled in 1996, laying the groundwork for what would later become affectionately known as the \"Age of Velier's Demerara,\" which began in earnest in 2004 after Gargano was invited to the Demerara Distillers Ltd warehouses in Guyana to select tropically aged barrels to be bottled be officially distributed by Velier for the first time. This is one of those first 1996 releases, bottled for Velier in Liverpool by Thomson & Company and joined by a Port Mourant and two Diamond rums in the batch. Hugely important, these rums established a firm relationship between Velier and DDL, who offered to bottle the subsequent releases in 2000 through their Dutch subsidiary, Breitenstein Produkten. A third selection in 2002 then took the final crucial step, this time bottled in Guyana from tropically aged casks selected from the DDL warehouses. All of the bottles between 1996 and 2002 represent important milestones on the journey to the first of those legendary 2004 releases.

This one is a 1985 vintage from the Versailles still at Enmore, bottled from sherry wood casks #51, #52 and #60.

The Enmore sugar estate was established by Edward Henry Porter in the early 19th century after he inherited and converted his father’s cotton plantation on the east bank of the Demerara river. Once one of many in the area, by the time the government in Guyana had begun to nationalise and consolidate the country’s rum production in 1974, it was one of only four remaining. The traditional still at Enmore was the historic two-column wooden coffey still, constructed back in 1880 and modelled almost exactly after the first continuous still patented by Aeneas Coffey in 1832. This however was distilled on the Versailles single wooden pot still, moved to Enmore from its eponymous distillery after its closure in 1974. It is constructed from Greenheart wood, which is native to Guyana and is mostly used in boat-building due to its ability to remain strong while constantly wet. The wood is also well suited to distilling, stripping spirit of sulphites in the same manner that copper does. Enmore was eventually closed by Demerara Distillers in 1994, and both stills were moved to Uitvlugt. Today they remain operational as the “Heritage Stills” at Diamond, the only remaining distillery in the country.