#87 Daniele Biondi - Indiana Jones of Rum, Clairin & Haiti, Viche & Colombia, Hampden, Velier, Luca Gargano

Daniele Biondi is one of the world's leading experts on the rum category. Working with Luca Gargano at Velier, he is one of the key figures behind the international rediscovery of Haitian clairin, the new wave of Colombian sugarcane spirits, and a driving force behind the Hampden Estate story. He's been working with rum since the 90's but over the last 15 years particularly, Daniele has spent much of his time travelling to the world's least-documented rum-producing regions — Haiti, Colombia, the Philippines, and more — searching out distilleries that, in his words, "aren't on Google."

These distilleries are often so numerous and geographically dispersed that it bodes the question - have we actually seen or tasted much of the world's rums?

Daniele began his career bartending in Milan in the late 1990s, and found there was almost no reliable information on the category available anywhere so he began researching obsessively. That personal research project became, in February 2007, one of the first rum blogs in Europe: not just a blog, but a functioning reference work, a "kind of Wikipedia" for rum at a time when the internet had almost nothing on the subject. It grew past 3,000 readers before he even realised it was a significant following, and led directly to him becoming president of Italy's Rum Club.

From there, his path diverges from almost every other rum communicator working today. Rather than build a personal media brand, he was recruited into an EU-funded Caribbean producers' association and spent years as a full-time, on-the-ground rum educator — travelling constantly (by his own account, "14 islands in 14 days," well over 100 days a year in some markets), running tastings, PR and trade negotiations, and building direct relationships with producers across Italy, France, Spain and the UK.

Then came the discovery work most people do associate with him, even if they don't always connect the name to it: it was Daniele who, in 2012, first went looking for Haiti's undocumented clairin distilleries — "not on Google" — and helped bring what's now a globally recognised spirit category into being. He did the same, more quietly, in Colombia, surfacing viche and the Afro-Colombian women producers behind it, and again in the Philippines, discovering a young distiller working in methods inspired by Hampden. And alongside Luca Gargano, he's been one of the central figures shaping Hampden Estate's modern reputation and the whole aged-clairin project — categories and products that are now widely celebrated, even if the person who did much of the groundwork isn't always credited alongside them.

That's arguably the throughline of Daniele's career: he's one of the most consistent, sustained driving forces in modern rum education and discovery over the last two decades, and by his own description, one of the least self-promotional. He calls Velier "a dependent bottler" rather than claiming credit, describes his own day-to-day as "90% of my time on Excel," and treats the travel and discovery as the job itself rather than a platform. He's recognised within the trade — but given the scale and duration of what he's actually built, still arguably deserves to be a much bigger name than he is.

Side note: he also wrote the introduction for the Italian version of my rum book.

The conversation ranges from muddy backroads in rural Haiti to the fermentation room at Hampden, and from the mechanics of ester chemistry to why flavour is ultimately an emotional, personal experience.

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