Rum

Whilst 'reeds that make honey without bees' first grew in on the island now known as New Guinea, it was farmers in India who first created a commercial sugar industry around 2,600 years ago. The plant wound its way through Persia and Greece, and by the time of Columbus's second voyage to the Caribbean in 1493, it was cultivated on the Canary Islands, from where he took some plants to the Caribbean. The rest is a tumultuous history of invasion, plantation, slavery and piracy with a saving grace of having created what is now rightly regarded as one of the world's great spirits. As with whisky, much of what is produced is a simple product, but rums from single distilleries, often from single casks, are exquisite and the shift in the industry from quantity to quality over the last decade or so, means that rum as a high-quality spirit on par with the best cognacs and single malts, is firmly established.