Santa Teresa 1796 arrives in travel retail

Bacardi Global Travel Retail has announced the global launch in travel retail of the multi-award winning Santa Teresa 1796 single estate rum. A one-litre format is offered especially for travel retail, with Lagardère stores at Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport as the first airport locations to offer this super-premium, single estate rum from Venezuela.

Bacardi took on the global distribution (outside of Venezuela) of the family-owned Ron Santa Teresa portfolio in January 2017. Santa Teresa 1796 is a bold and elegant rum that strengthens Bacardi’s ambition to use its category expertise to accelerate the significant commercial opportunity for super-premium rum in Travel Retail.

From the sugar cane to bottle, Santa Teresa 1796 is grown, harvested, aged and each bottle is hand-sealed, as a single estate rum using the complex, artisanal Solera method – where no barrel is fully emptied, the most recent blends mixing and ageing with the oldest.  The blend is a combination of rums, aged from four to 35 years. 

Mike Birch, managing director of Bacardi GTR comments: “There is strong potential in travel retail for a super-premium rum like this, especially in terms of its age and craft, appealing to shoppers at the second stage of luxury whose key purchase motivations are for aged spirits and the discovery of something rare and out of the main-stream.  For the same reasons, we also see an opportunity to recruit new rum shoppers from the whisky category.”

“This is an exceptional craft rum with a long and unique heritage, which also looks to the future, where its story is interesting and purposeful. The Vollmer family-run distillery has a big heart, and they are committed to making a positive impact in their community, bringing employment opportunities and rugby together in Proyecto Alcatraz, an inspirational project, transforming lives in the local community.”

The artisanal Solera method takes sugar cane grown on the Santa Teresa state and juices it to extract the molasses, which are then taken to the estate distillery.  Water used in the rum production comes from natural wells deep in the estate land. Continuous fermentation and distillation in pots stills is followed by long ageing in French oak barrels with refinement in oak vats, before hand blending by the Maestro Ronero, with every bottle wax-sealed by hand.

Santa Teresa 1796, 40% ABV, is available in GTR in 1 litre bottles, RRP US$60.

26 September 2017 - Felicity Murray The Drinks Report, editor-in-chief