If you haven’t noticed that rum is the drink of the moment, you either haven’t been paying attention or you are patronising the wrong clubs and bars. We’re not talking about basic, Bacardi-lookalike white rums, which, like vodka, have gained an almost embarrassingly young audience. Nor are we talking about dark rum, which is reinventing itself with some success, but hasn’t completely shaken off the burdensome old-fashioned slipper-and-fag baggage. The rum category that is now one of the fastest-growing spirits in the UK and many other countries is gold.

Cask-aged gold rums from the Caribbean have caught on partly because they make a mean cocktail (where would we be without mojitos and daiquiris?), but also because they are great stand-alone drinks — smooth, sophisticated spirits with proper flavour. They also have the kind of heritage and tradition that marketing departments can usually only dream of. That doesn’t mean they are all long-established names. In fact it is high-quality, stylishly packaged new brands, such as Elements 8 and Mahiki, that are blazing a trail through top bars and now trickling out into the shops.

Mahiki Gold Rum, £29.99 Created for Mayfair’s Mahiki club; full-bodied Barbados rum with vanilla and roast raisin flavour(Selfridges).

Elements 8 Gold Rum, £30.99-£37.50 Fine St Lucia rum with dried-fig and subtle toasty-oak flavour (Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Fortnum & Mason, drinkon.com ).

Chairman’s Reserve Rum, £13.99 Award-winning new import from St Lucia. Full, round, spicy and raisiny (thedrinkshop.com).

Wine bluff: The first true rums came from Barbados”

Anorak fact: Barbados also has one of the world’s oldest distilleries, RL Seale & Co Ltd

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