Demerara Distillers LTD

Demerara Distillers Limited houses the oldest stills in the world which are still kept in perfect working order. For more than three hundred years, DDL had sold its rum only in barrels in Europe, with the exception of the El Dorado brand, born in 1992 and imported by Velier since 1996. 

But the truly fatal encounter between Velier and Demerara took place in 1999, when Luca, visiting Guyana, met the chairman of the DDL, Yesu Persaud, who would change his vision of rum forever. Luca's intuition will lead to proposing to Yesu to bottle the individual different expressions from the different stills. Thus began the story of the first original and unique bottlings in the world of different wines marks Demerara, kept at full capacity and totally aged at the distillery.

The first three releases were bottled in November 2000 by Breitenstein Products, the European branch that had DDL at the time and which from 2003 became Demerara Distillers Europe. This was the only occasion in which the samples were sent and not selected directly by Luca. It will be from the following series bottled in 2002 with Port Mourant 1982 Diamond 1982 and Albion 1984 that Luca will select each Demerara bottling with exclusive access to the N°1 warehouse of the distillery in Guyana. Yesu used to prepare samples which they would then taste and select together. Once selected, the samples were sent to Velier to be retasted by Luca. From 2005, with Skeldon 1973, the style of the label and the bottle changed which will remain unchanged until the last bottling in 2014. With the exception of Luca's latest Demerara selection released on the market on the occasion of Velier's 70th anniversary, the Port Mourant & Diamond 2001, bottled in 2017 in the bottle of the El Dorado Rare Collection series.