Region & History

Diplomático rum comes from Lara, a state in northwestern Venezuela. Just before the village of La Miel, whose name means "the honey" in Spanish, stands the Destilerías Unidas distillery, known as DUSA for short. Behind it rise the final foothills of the Andes, and the house itself emphasizes this location at the base of the mountains.

Sugarcane arrived with the Spanish, and Barquisimeto, the capital of Lara, was founded in 1552. In colonial Venezuela, enslaved Africans worked on sugar and cacao haciendas until the country abolished slavery in 1854. Sugarcane remained an important crop in this region, and the factories still supply the distillery with molasses today.

The present-day distillery is considerably younger. In 1959, local rum producers built it together with Seagram's, then the largest beverage company in the world. Seagram's brought along equipment for whisky and gin, which is why the operation can still do more than just rum today. When the conglomerate was broken up in the early 2000s, a group of investors bought the operation from Diageo in 2002 and continued running it as Destilerías Unidas.

Then comes the name that causes confusion in Germany. Is Botucal the same as Diplomático? Yes, it's the same rum from the same distillery. Since March 2012 it has been sold there as Botucal, because Aldi considers the name "Diplomat" to belong to brandy and won the dispute over the name. Botucal recalls a sugarcane-growing area once called "Botuka."

Who owns Diplomático today? Brown-Forman, the company behind Jack Daniel's. The company agreed to acquire the Diplomático and Botucal brands in October 2022 and completed the deal on January 5, 2023.

Legally, the rum from Lara falls under the geographical indication Ron de Venezuela. The country has protected it since August 15, 2003, and has listed it as a DOC, a controlled designation of origin, since 2019. It requires Venezuelan raw materials and at least two years of aging in oak casks. The application for EU protection dates from 2020 and has not yet been registered.