The rum of Mauritius, from molasses to vesou

Sugar is no longer the backbone of the Mauritian economy, but its by-products remain highly prized, rum first among them. It is born of the cane, like sugar, and its making can be followed from start to finish at a few estates on the island. Before stepping through their doors, one distinction helps to understand what you will be tasting.

There are two ways of making rum in Mauritius. The first starts from molasses, the syrupy residue that forms when sugar crystallises. It is the main ingredient of the traditional sugar-factory rums, and the island produces a great deal of it: in 2025, its factories turned out 82,533 tonnes, alongside 220,305 tonnes of sugar. Molasses is also used as cattle feed and to produce bioethanol.

The second starts from the cane juice itself, known as vesou. This is called agricultural distillation, and the result rhum agricole. At Chamarel, the cane is crushed as soon as it is harvested, to keep the juice fresh; it ferments and then goes on to distillation. Both families are then distilled by one of two methods: continuously, in a column, or in batches, in a traditional pot still.

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Chamarel, cane from the plateau

La Rhumerie de Chamarel was created to produce a rhum agricole of high quality. It opened in 2008 in the village of Chamarel, in the south-west, 300 metres above the coast. The valley has its own microclimate, favourable to cane, which the estate grows itself and harvests by hand, without ever burning it. The access road runs through cane fields interspersed with pineapples.

The building was designed from the outset to receive visitors. Its architect, the Mauritian Maurice Giraud, used wood, natural stone and water, and blended it into the landscape. Professional guides lead the visit through every stage of production, from the copper stills to the cellars where the rum ages in oak casks. It ends with a tasting of all the house rums: white rums, wood-aged rums, old rum, rhums arrangés and rum-based liqueurs. The rum first passes through stainless-steel vats before ageing in barrels, and some pot-still cuvées spend nine or ten years in cask.

The visit with tasting needs no booking, Monday to Saturday, from 9.30am to 4.30pm; the distillery is closed on Sundays. It also houses a restaurant, L’Alchimiste, whose cooking draws on the local terroir.

In the north, at Beau Plan, L’Aventure du Sucre devotes the last stage of its tour to rum. Visitors enter an interactive distillery. There they set the yeast, the temperature and the time themselves, to understand how fermentation turns sugars into alcohol. A real copper column, brought to life by projections, explains continuous distillation: the arrival of the fermented wash, the rising steam, condensation, the separation of the streams. A traditional pot still then shows the three stages of batch distillation: the molasses wine becomes alcohol, the alcohol gains in strength, then a clear rum emerges, ready for ageing or blending. A resting vat recalls that rum is reduced and stabilised over several months, and real oak casks open up the world of the cellar master.

The house on show is New Grove, the rum of the Harel family, which presents itself as the oldest distillery on the island. At the museum shop, the guided tasting takes in fifteen New Grove rums, whose provenance, ageing and aromatic profile the guide explains.

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Labourdonnais, Saint Aubin and rhum arrangé

At the Château de Labourdonnais, in Mapou, the house rums can be tasted blind, for those who want to test their palate, and workshops teach how to make one’s own rhum arrangé. The estate’s fruit juices, jams and fruit pastes can be tasted too. In the south, near Rivière des Anguilles, the Domaine de Saint Aubin, a former cane estate that is now a stop on the Tea Route, has a traditional rum distillery where tastings are offered, next to its colonial house, a listed national heritage site.

Rhum arrangé, flavoured with fruit or spices, has made its way into hotel bars, which also offer long rum lists. At Shanti Maurice, in Saint-Félix, the Rum Shed lines up more than two hundred and fifty rums from thirty-six countries, in the setting of an old village shop. At the Four Seasons at Anahita, the Rum Library gathers the rums of the Vanilla Islands. But it is on the estates that rum is best understood: where one sees the cane, the vesou or the molasses, the column or the pot still, and the cask where time does the rest.