Rum from Saint Lucia was the big attraction at a tasting event held by the ally’s embassy in Taipei on Thursday, which attracted about 50 representatives from local businesses.
As one of its oldest industries, rum has a long history in the Caribbean nation, Saint Lucia Ambassador Edwin Laurent said.
Saint Lucia has been producing rum for hundreds of years, ever since Europeans settled in the Caribbean and planted sugarcane, Laurent said.
The attendees were mostly from hotels, restaurants and bars, alongside international dignitaries, who sampled rum paired with cocktail-style finger food.
Among the brands to sample was Chairman’s Reserve rums produced by Saint Lucia Distillers Group of Companies.
“Taiwanese generally seem to have good taste when it comes to spirits and we have a high-quality product, and when we let people sample it, we find that they love it,” Laurent said. “It’s a large market for us, it’s 23 million people, so we know if we could establish this sort of business, it would be valuable.”
Exporting Saint Lucian rum to Taiwan is not just about business, it is also about building friendship and relations, he said.
“To build friendship, it is good if you could do business at the same time,” Laurent said.
Even though in the 1950s and 1960s Saint Lucia transitioned from mainly producing sugar to bananas, rum production did not stop as the country began importing molasses from other countries, Saint Lucia Distillers Group chief executive officer Margaret Monplaisir said in a prerecorded video.
It is “a practice which still continues until this day, except that the boat shipments have become much larger over the years,” Monplaisir said.
Andrew Kuo (郭廷彥), brand supervisor at alcoholic drink distributor Importer Co, said he had sold 700 to 800 bottles of rum from Saint Lucia in the past two years.
“Not many people in Taiwan drink rum straight, as they still prefer to mix it in cocktails, but we have seen changes and growth in the past few years,” he said.
Trade between the two countries totaled US$431,558 in the first 11 months of this year, Bureau of Foreign Trade data showed.
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