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Who are you, Luca Gargano?

Publié le 21 décembre 2022

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Spirit

The CEO of Velier is a rock star in the realm of rum – and beyond. His iconic black bottlings are snapped up as soon as they reach stores, and are beloved by speculators and enthusiasts alike. He explains himself to Whisky Magazine & Fine Spirits, gives us unvarnished answers to the questions that swirl around his collector’s items, and lets us peek at what’s behind the legend he sometimes wears as armour.

Having barely reached the office at this matutinal hour, he rushes off with an apology – a meeting with two sake importers. He reappears, flees again to answer a phone call. Elusive. As the day progresses, the interview moves from park to cellar, patio to belfry, office to vegetable garden, up, down, up again… It’s a little dizzying. We break at the outdoor bar in the garden, on the sofas in the cellar bar, on the stools in the tower bar – a roaming interview, nomadic even, through the twists and turns and several floors of the superb 17^th-Century Patrician villa, perched near the Mediterranean in the very heart of Genoa, where Velier set up shop not two years ago. Compelling Luca Gargano to answer questions is quite like attempting to put an antelope on a leash: nigh impossible. The permanently-side-tracked Italian jumps from natural wine to honey, elaborates on the three steps of pasta-making, can spend a half hour discoursing on the quality of the tomatoes he plants in Calabria, gushes about an African artist as he shows off his sublime collection of Afro-Caribbean art, all the while dipping shortbread biscuits into a tumbler of 12-year-old Hampden. The Velier CEO knows how to leverage his rock-star fame and accompanying freedom of tone – a bottomless fount of rum expertise, revisiting the well-worn anecdotes that made him who he is. His legend is his armor. A man surrounded by people but built for solitude. The years have slightly tempered the adventurer who can only breathe on the move, who doesn’t own a mobile phone, raves against social media while keeping a close eye on his Facebook page’s stats. The man fits the legend, but with ample room for surprises. He is free.

What’s this? [I gesture towards the black Velier bottle bearing a red label that reads ‘Mother Mesccia – Double Single Rum’]

Luca Gargano: Ah! A collaboration with Prince Albert of Monaco. He came here to ask for my help recreating mesccia, a liqueur Monacans used to make by adding vermouth and ouzo to rum. The Grimaldi are a noble family originally from Genoa. To reinvent mesccia in 2022, instead of putting vermouth into rum, we put rum into vermouth casks and dropped the ouzo – it led to something elegant. The first batch was distilled in Haiti, [due to logistical concerns, the Guadeloupe distillery Papa Rouyo has temporarily taken over, nda] the second in Monaco. And I realized that I had inadvertently made a ‘double single rum’!

Why distil the first batch in Haiti?

L.G.: For the cristalline, the saccharum officinarum, the best sugarcane in the world. Raw material, raw material, raw material: the very essence. That’s what I want to highlight in all my bottlings. That and fermentation. What yeast? Wild, or commercial? How long? With or without vinasse? And after that, distillation and aging.

You are recognized as one of the pioneers of rum transparency, meaning that you provide a lot of information about your bottlings.

L.G.: Transparency is about honesty. Everyone has their place in rum, from McDonald’s to the Michelin-starred, and that’s a good thing. But on the condition that McDonald’s doesn’t go around claiming it’s a 3-star. Do you sweeten your rum? No problem, just say so.

You are also criticized for introducing speculation into the rum market…

L.G.: Look, when the 1973 and 1978 Full Proof Skeldons came out in 2005, I sold them for around 120€. Fifteen years later, I was happy and proud to see them fetching 30k. What ticks me off is seeing the 80€ Saint James on the second-hand market for 200€ the day after release, and flipped four times within a month. But in every market where the supply is lower than the demand, prices go up. I bottled Papalins, which go for 22€ in Italy, to prove that affordable, drinkable rums could be sold in my Velier bottle. But even that became a collector’s item! When I bottle a single cask today, I get more flak than I do happy customers. And I know that half of those 200 buyers will be speculators. To be frank, I had to buy some of my own bottlings for over 3,000€ because I didn’t have them anymore and wanted to put them in the collection.

Ah, hoist by your own petard then!

L.G.: [He smiles] It’s no longer possible for me to release rums that aren’t speculative commodities. And speculation today doesn’t only target old Demeraras and Caronis. The Hampden Estate Great House is a collector’s item because there are fewer bottles than the regular edition. I think it’s normal that rums become valuable. Why should we accept it for grands vins and single malts but not rum – especially rums aged in tropical regions with an angel’s share of 10% a year? Look at how much a second-hand Birkin handbag costs!

So there’s nothing to be done?

L.G.: There is. I created the VSGB label, or Velier Small Great Bottles, 10cl flasks that are only sold to enthusiasts who commit to no resale. And it works – I believe only 5% of buyers have gone back on their word. This has changed peoples’ perception somewhat – the Facebook group has over a thousand lovers of rum; they’ve become a force to be reckoned with. But you know, I’ve always highlighted the distilleries on my bottles, and I’ve always told the producers that they need to increase their prices. I’m going to end up losing interest in speculation. I make the best rums I can, and I sell them for a fair price depending on how rare they are. Everything else, well… [He spreads his arms fatalistically]

Like with all bottles subjected to speculation, Velier has to deal with fakes…

L.G.: Yes, I know, I’ve seen one of my empty bottles on eBay for 150€. I try to limit the issue as much as I can by increasing the amount of packaging details: the bottles are wrapped in a very specific printed silk paper, and have capsules that make counterfeiting more difficult. But these days I could piss into a black Velier bottle and no-one would notice for five years because no-one opens them anymore! That’s the problem! To encourage people to drink them, I’m going to include a QR code that can only be seen when the bottle is opened, and will give access to exclusive ‘angel’s share bonuses’. For instance, maybe someone could win a chance to come here, to la Velier.

You sometimes refer to it as ‘la’ Velier. Where does the name originate?

L.G.: It’s originally the acronym for Vini e Licori Importazione e Redistribuzione. When I first got here, it was still written with dots between the letters and we used to call it ‘la Velier’.

Italy was very into whisky when you bought the company. How did you get to rum?

L.G.: I took over Velier in 1983, but our first rum release was in 1987. I wanted a Bally, I would’ve done anything for that brand… And then people started discovering Havana Club and Cuba Libres in the early 90s. Young people started to look down on whisky as old-fashioned. And I thought, the sadder and greyer Europe becomes, the more we’ll need sunshine, so I started importing Santa Teresa, Brugal… And ended up kickstarting the rum craze in Italy. We were discovering brands and distilleries unheard of in Europe.

And then came the discovery of Demerara rums…

L.G.: Late 90s, I started importing DDL (Demerara Distillers Ldt). I went to Guyana. And when I saw the Diamond stills… Cazzo! The old wooden stills… Guyana completely changed my outlook. That’s when I started doing my first bottlings for Velier – Demeraras. To this day, people are scouring Italian villages looking for those black bottles.

The now-iconic black Velier bottle, is that a proprietary thing?

L.G.: Yes, but I originally spotted it in the cellar of a little bar in Milan. It was a whisky bottle. It’s the signature of my co-bottlings – I’m not an independent bottler, mind! All my co-bottlings are official, produced and aged by their respective distilleries on-premises. And they put the distiller’s name front and centre, not Velier.

Was becoming a distiller yourself a natural evolution of your career, your life? Or was it a coincidence?

L.G.: A natural evolution. I wanted to make an old-school rhum agricole, in a still. And in 1999, a friend introduced me to Marie-Galante. Paradise. We ate chaudage in a beach cabin on a Friday… it was incredible. We created RhumRhum with Gianni Capovilla, set up our Muller still at Bielle’s. And then the relationship with Bielle soured.

RhumRhum was relocated to Père Labat’s?

L.G.: Yes, it was perfect. We started distilling again in late September, but permits got delayed. The next white rums will be released soon, and the Liberations [old RhumRhums -CL] are out in 2023. There have only been five vattings since RhumRhum was created, we don’t have any stores. It turns out I have more casks in Port-Au-Prince than on Marie-Galante!

Speaking of Haiti. Isn’t starting a distillery in Port-au-Prince brave at best, reckless at worst?

L.G.: We created the Providence distillery in Port-au-Prince in 2017, in partnership with La Maison du Whisky. I think they’re the only foreign company to have invested in Haiti since the earthquake. The country has so much potential… but yes, it’s very complicated. There are enormous logistical problems, and Herbert Linge, the distiller, only travels in armoured cars because of gang attacks. It’s quieter as soon as you’re away from the capital. In any event, I have no intention of dropping Haiti, I go there at least once or twice a year. I purchased land to replant sugarcane on Île-à-Vache, and I bought a bull on Facebook.

A whaaaat? On Facebook?

L.G.: A bull. To till the soil. I found it for sale on Facebook, I clicked, I bought it [of course -CL]. I want to set up a small still on the island for the first distillations, and we’ll do the second pass in Port-au-Prince.

Are there any rum-producing countries left for Europe to discover?

L.G.: Yes, in South America. Three years ago I did a screening in Ecuador, we counted a hundred or so stills. Two producers caught our eye, specifically, and we’re going to bottle them. We’re still looking at Peru and Columbia. The problem is the quality is very uneven – these are farmers’ brandies, some of the last remaining links between men and the soil. Like clairins, they have an unbelievable energy. We could do chemical, physical, microbial analyses of a rum until the cows come home, but that wouldn’t tell us anything about its energy.

What’s the strangest place you’ve ever found rum?

L.G.: Trinidad, actually. I landed in Trinidad and stumbled upon 20-year-old Caroni casks completely by accident. You know, when I think about this story, I can hardly believe it myself! It was December 9^th, 2004. I knew that Caroni sold in bulk, but I didn’t know there were heavy Caronis.

What had brought you to Trinidad?

L.G.: A woman… Urska. [He grabs the photo album, reminiscing as he turns the pages] The Trinidadian government had shut down the Caroni refinery-distillery, and I was passing by. I was let into the warehouse, and started drooling like a dog that’s given a steak for dinner. I took samples and contacted the liquidator. I bought a part of the inventory for a ridiculously low price. Love or hate Caroni, but you can’t water it down. I didn’t have the courage to bottle the first ones full proof, which I regret in hindsight.

And the rest of the Caroni inventory?

L.G.: I bought a second batch, then a third with LMDW, which I shipped to DDL to continue the tropical aging process. In 2008 there was an auction of Caroni lights, which had been sent to Europe. Little to do with the heavy rums I had bought. We brought home the last casks in 2019, selected the 23 best and put them into Cognac dame-jeannes. The 1996 and 1998 Caroni Paradises were released in late October, sold in hand-blown bottles for 3,000€. Those were the first and last Caronis, I don’t think I’ll sell the remaining casks. The bottlings may go into the Velier collection – we’ll see.

There mustn’t have been much left in the casks…

L.G.: Steffen Mayer, who wrote a comprehensive book on Caroni, calculated that I’ve lost 23 million euros’ worth of angel’s share since I started bottling this rum. For me, tropical aging is non-negotiable. It’s… well, if you only think with your head, you just don’t do everything I have. The clairins were because I stopped to help a guy by the roadside, asked him who made the best rum, and he took me to Baradères in the backwoods of Haiti to meet Casimir Duncan, Faubert’s father. And RhumRhum I’ve told you about already… Sometimes I wonder: would I still have the strength today to follow those instincts, without thinking?