Rum goes back to funky flavor

If you taste enough wines and spirits, you'll eventually experience certain coveted flavors and aromas that, at first blush, would seem funky and undesirable.

Think about these wine descriptors: minerality, tobacco, barnyard, petrol. What exactly are we talking about when we use such terms? Why, a newbie might reasonably ask, would anyone even want those qualities in a glass of wine? And yet, connoisseurs seek out rieslings redolent of gasoline, nebbiolos teeming with tar and Rhône reds that reek of the barn.

The spirits world has its own array of strangely prized flavors and aromas. Think of bitter Italian amari or herbal, vegetal liqueurs like Chartreuse. One of my favorite Old World descriptors is rancio, which crops up when people talk about fine brandy.

Rancio — yes, the word shares a root with "rancid" — is the term for a peculiar flavor that cognac and Armagnac and sometimes Scotch take on as they age. It is, of course, impossible to fully describe. Nutty? Mushroomy? Cheesy? Like soy sauce? Beyond flavor, rancio also connotes a certain feel or sensation in the mouth, the way old brandy often presents itself on the tongue and finishes with an almost walnutlike oiliness.

But rancio isn't the only weird and desirable aroma in fine spirits. Lately, there has been a growing interest in rums that have a certain funky quality called hogo.

Hogo was used in the 18th- and 19th-century rum trade to describe the sulfurous odors that happen naturally when raw sugar cane juice is distilled. The term is Creole slang for the French term haut gout ("high taste"), which was specifically used to describe the mature decay of wild game meat that had been hung to age. I chuckled to see haut gout defined on Wiktionary as a taste that "used to be desirable but is not generally desired anymore today."

Perhaps not when it comes to game meat. But among spirits nerds, hogo has never been more desirable.

Of course, contemporary drinkers are looking for a little more idiosyncrasy in their spirits — cane-based spirits included. The road to hogo began with the rise of rhum agricole and cachaca, when people began to experience the joys of pure sugar cane, including the complex vegetal-herbal qualities those two spirits brought to the party. Then the old-timey, hogo-ful batavia arrack, an Indonesian rumlike spirit made from sugar cane and red rice, became a fashionable ingredient at high-end cocktail spots.

The market is now full of funky rums, what cocktail historian Dave Wondrich calls "full-on pirate juice": 114-proof Smith & Cross from Jamaica, demerara rums from Guyana such as El Dorado, white Rhum Barbancourt from Haiti, and Banks 5 Island, which includes a little batavia arrack in its blend.

Hogo is so of-the-moment that it's the name of the latest high-profile bar in the District of Columbia

"Hogo is used to describe something that's impossible to describe any other way," says Tom Brown, who owns the new rum-tiki concept in D.C. "These are tricky aromas, deceptive aromas, and they lead you to believe it's going to taste like something different than it does."

The best way to tame hogo is with lime and sugar or honey. Which is why the recipe here is my twist on the Ti Punch, a Martinique classic. Ti Punch, like hogo, is Creole slang: In this case, for "petit punch."