Compagnie des Indes Rum Australia 11 years 43% 700ml

Compagnie des Indes is the youngest house we represent and the only one that doesn't distil. Florent Beuchet — a French spirits man trained on Citadelle gin and Cognac Ferrand — founded it in 2014 with a working brief: travel the Caribbean, walk distilleries from Jamaica to Guyana to Belize, and select single casks personally. The casks ship to France, age out in Beuchet's cellars, and bottle under the Compagnie des Indes label. No additives, no sugar, no chill-filtration. What's in the cask is what's in the bottle.

The name is direct: the original Compagnie française des Indes occidentales was the French West India Company, founded in 1664 to handle the colonial trade in sugar, rum and spice. Beuchet borrowed both the name and the trade route — the same Caribbean origins, three and a half centuries later, curated rather than industrially produced. Single-cask releases identify the distillery, age, vintage and outturn; blended bottlings (the West Indies, the Caraïbes, the Latino) layer multiple origins for a designed flavour rather than a single-house signature.

Bouchon's Compagnie des Indes range is the deepest Caribbean shelf we carry — 29 active SKUs covering Jamaica (Hampden, Worthy Park, Long Pond), Trinidad (Caroni, T.D.L.), Barbados (Foursquare, West Indies), Guyana (Diamond, Port Mourant), Belize, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the multi-island blends. For trade buyers building a Caribbean rum programme, this is where to start a single-cask flight without committing to a house.