Renewed Spirit

After a close brush with death in the Boxing Day Tsunami, a young French woman was inspired to return and bring new life to Phuket in the form of a boutique rum

On 26 December 2004, a teenage Marine Lucchini was on holiday with her family.

They had visited Khao Lak - a picturesque part of southern Thailand close to Phuket - every year for a decade, but during that particular Christmas holiday disaster struck.

The Boxing Day Tsunami that came that day devastated everything. The result of the third largest earthquake ever recorded, more than 220,000 people were killed in the disaster that decimated communities across Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India.

Back in Khao Lak, Lucchini had been stunned by the tidal onslaught and had no idea where her parents were. Shocked and disorientated, she was desperately struggling to survive in the face of the destruction. Almost 75 percent of people staying at the same resort died that day, though Lucchini was fortunately later reunited with her family.

What struck her in the aftermath of the tsunami was how the Thais in the area did everything they could to assist the injured and locate the missing, bridging all social and cultural barriers. That memory never left her, and she vowed to one day repay the people of Thailand, and give something back to the community that had helped her.

Growing up first in France and then later moving to Russia, Lucchini spent much of her childhood accompanying her father on his frequent work trips for a French wine and spirits company. This included visits to Africa, and Martinique in the Caribbean, where she visited the famed Rhum Saint James distillery, which he often represented.

“I specialized in and was totally passionate about science all during high school, and there decided that my future life projects will involve science,” recalls Lucchini. “I then studied management at business school to make sure I’d be able to understand and manage all the aspects of a project and be able to make it happen. The scientific part of building a distillery and making a spirit is one of the aspects that really excites me, and also why I chose this project. I studied the science of it in parallel by myself.”

It was on the management course at business school where Lucchini met her future business partner Thibault Spithakis. Although he had worked in a variety of fields, including toy manufacturing in China, he grew up in vineyards in the south of France where his family had been making wine for generations – it was an ideal pairing.

Having decided to start a project from scratch, the entrepreneurial pair both felt Thailand was the obvious place to base it, and – given the drinks background of both their respective families – alcohol seemed the logical industry to enter. Having carried out their market research, they saw that the rum sector - dominated by mass market local brands such as Sang Som and Hong Thong, both produced by the industry giant Thai Beverage (better known as ThaiBev) - had room for a niche, high quality product.

Realising that competition would be more intense in Bangkok, the headquarters for ThaiBev, Singha and other all of Thailand’s major drinks manufacturers, they instead chose to set up shop in Phuket – the second largest drinks market in Thailand due to the millions of tourists that visited, but a place that would hopefully allow for a small, new company like theirs the chance to make its mark on the market. “We also wanted to keep the French Caribbean tradition of making rum on an island,” says Lucchini. Having found their location, they began producing natural rum using Thai sugarcane.

Before we continue, let’s indulge in a quick lesson about rum production. Most rum is distilled from fermented sugar cane juice, sugar cane syrup, sugar cane molasses, or other sugar cane byproducts, and its manufacture is split into two main categories, being industrial and natural. Industrial rums come from the distillation of molasses, a residue of the sugar cane obtained after sugar manufacturing. This represents some 90 percent of the world’s production, including famous names such as Bacardi, Captain Morgan, and Havana Club. Natural rum, however, such as Lucchini’s and Saint James from Martinique, comes from distilling fresh, fermented sugar cane juice - the result is a drink with much more aromatic flavor than its industrially-produced counterpart.

“Making rum from fresh sugarcane is a French Caribbean tradition,” says Lucchini. “It’s very big in France and not well known outside of it.” It’s interesting to note that different countries have different traditions: former British colonies use molasses to make their rum. The latter is because England forbade its colonies to use sugarcane for purposes other than sugar making, so by law they could only use molasses. Former French (or current French territories) and Portuguese colonies though use sugarcane.

“Usually, molasses rum is quite neutral in flavor because all the original flavors of the sugarcane have gone to the sugar and been destroyed or changed during the sugar making process,” explains Lucchini. “When we use fresh sugarcane, we can extract its aromas. This is my goal – to extract all its beautiful fruity aromas for drinkers to find in our rum.” However, there are exceptions to this rule such as Jamaican rums. “They use molasses but are very aromatic and this is linked to the way they ferment their rum,” Lucchini says. “It’s a very tiny minority but there are exceptions to this rule.”

Not everyone knows it, but sugar cane is actually indigenous to Southeast Asia, and Thailand is the world’s fourth largest producer, lagging only after Brazil, India and China (in terms of production for its size, the Kingdom is easily number one by some distance). “One of our dreams was to bring the French Caribbean tradition of making rum from fresh sugarcane back to the origin of sugarcane,” recalls Lucchini. There are more than 300 different varieties of sugar cane found in Thailand alone, which the two French partners eventually whittled down to just a handful after extensive testing.

They next imported a 40 year old French-made copper ‘alambique’ or distillation still, with Lucchini – the scientist of the pair – overseeing a centuries-old distilling process originating from the Armagnac region in southwest France. Once it’s then distilled, the rum is put in stainless steel tanks to rest, which helps seal in the taste and aroma.

As the scientific Lucchini explains: “The industry standard is to water down spirits in around one to three months. However, water and alcohol are different molecules and take time to blend well. So the longer we take, the smoother the spirit will be, and the less we will affect its flavors negatively. So we take an entire year. Most do not do this because it’s a big investment in stock. We also lose 10% per year through evaporation – the angel’s share. But it makes a real difference in terms of smoothness and flavors.”

Having come up with a home for their new drink, the next big question was what to call it. As Lucchini recollects, many of the world’s best rums are produced on islands – think Martinique and Saint James, and Barbados and Mount Gay – so it made sense to name it after the area in which they have their distillery (Lucchini also mentions she thought the name sounded “rumish”) and so Chalong Bay Rum was born. As Chalong means ‘celebration’ in Thai, the choice of name couldn't have been more appropriate.

Before it’d even gone into mass production, Chalong Bay Rum won the highest award for a white rum at the industry-leading Hong Kong International Wine and Spirit Competition 2012, Asia's largest such annual awards, which consisted of competitive entries by companies from more than 80 countries. Since then, the Phuket-made rum won several gold awards and trophies at the biggest spirit competitions in the world.

With a decade’s successful production behind them, producing thousands of bottles a month from their beautiful sugarcane-filled distillery in a very scenic part of Phuket, Lucchini’s rum is proof positive that out of terrible disaster can come great happiness.