“It was so funny, the other day I was travelling through Miami airport and when I reached Customs the guy asked me: ‘So what do you do?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m a master blender for Appleton rum.’ And he said: ‘This is the best excuse I’ve heard today!’ At the same time, however, the Customs officer sitting beside him was listening to the conversation. He looked across and he said, ‘Ohhhh my God! You’re the rum lady!’ And he jumped off his chair, came over and shook my hand.”

Joy Spence laughs and shakes her head as she retells the story. Coming through Customs is the only time she experiences “funny attitudes” she says, but since she travels often with her job, it happens a lot. Customs officers, for some reason, seem to have difficulty comprehending that a woman in her 60s could be in the rum business, let alone be a master blender. The anecdote also illustrates something else, however – that Spence is something of a superstar in the niche world of the drinks industry. Everybody knows about the ‘rum lady’. Since her appointment as master blender at Appleton Estate in 1997, she has managed to transform a backstage job into a starring role. Colourful, laid-back, sociable and warm, Spence’s public persona is almost the physical embodiment of rum. But there is a lot more to her than a smiling figurehead.

She is, for example, a chemist by trade. Her credentials include a Master’s in Analytical Science from Loughborough University, and that university’s record for the highest score in final exams, and a few years’ experience as a chemistry lecturer. She was never supposed to be the ‘rum lady’. Instead she imagined herself “in some laboratory, working as a chemist, with test-tubes and beakers”. However, in 1981 she was appointed chief chemist at Appleton’s parent company, J. Wray and Nephew Ltd, and unwittingly set course for an unlikely career. “I never drank a drop of rum until I joined the company,” she says. “And my father was quite furious – ‘Are you going to be making rum? Are you crazy?!’ – because it was not normal for a woman to be drinking rum openly. It was seen as just a totally male drink.” (Spence herself has done her fair share to change such attitudes – when she took over as master blender, she was the first woman ever to land such a position.) Her grounding in chemistry means she knows her rums not only on the palate, but on a molecular level – how the flavours, aromas and mouthfeel are created by specific compounds, the chemical processes by which these change over time, and what impact these will have on the rum’s sensory profile after, say, five years of barrel ageing.

 “My father was quite furious because it was not normal for a woman to be drinking rum openly. It was seen as just a totally male drink”

Chemistry alone is not enough, however. While rum samples can be and are analysed by machine, such apparatus comes nowhere near to the sensitivity of the human nose, which Spence says can detect more than 300 different aromas. (A US study published last year went even further and suggested our noses could pick up 1,000,000,000,000 different smells.) It is the master blender’s responsibility to test and assess the dozens of samples which come in from Appleton’s stills – Spence estimates that she tests around 40 a day – and to check them against the results of chemical analysis. A rum sample may get the all clear in the lab, but be picked up as defective during a tasting. A superlative sense of smell is therefore essential. It’s an attribute that you have to be born with, Spence says, and then which needs to be perfected by patient, persistent training.

Her transition from analytical chemist to sensory-led blender was a gradual one, taking place over 16 years’ collaboration with her predecessor, Owen Tulloch, during which she honed her sensory skills. Just how successful that honing has been is illustrated in two anecdotes she joyfully recounts. The first is an occasion when she was sent some ginger to sample. To everyone else, it just smelt of ginger, but to Spence, there was a definite whiff of curry. She wrote to the supplier, raising her concerns, and indeed it turned out that in the same factory where the ginger had been powdered, they had also been powdering turmeric. The second, similar story concerns an environmental incident. Spence told stunned regulators she could smell benzine in the air and, sure enough, some time later the official report was published, confirming benzine as one of the air pollutants. “So that’s the thing with me. Everywhere I go I’m, ‘Oh gosh, I’m smelling salmon, I’m smelling fig,’ and people are saying, ‘What? what?!’,” Spence laughs again, as she often does when telling anecdotes. “Sometimes it’s quite annoying when you’re always thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m smelling this, I’m smelling that.’”

Spence is a scientist and modern convention tells us that the arts and sciences don’t mix. I wonder whether or not she finds it difficult to balance the two

Of course, one of the most important roles of a master blender is blending. Rum, Spence assures me, is the most versatile spirit in the world, perfect as a mixer, in a cocktail, or sipped neat, “capable of infinite variations, in terms of the different styles, ages and aroma”. It’s from these infinite variations that she must craft a potentially infinite range of new products. Such a task requires flair and creativity, the deft hand of an artist. But Spence is a scientist and modern convention tells us that the arts and sciences don’t mix. I wonder whether or not she finds it difficult to balance the two, but Spence says not. Like a modern-day Renaissance woman, she is capable of both. “I’m a scientist at heart,” she tells me, “but I always tell people whenever they do my personality profile, although I’m a scientist I’m being pulled over to the creative side, so I really have a good blend between the two. I’m not a ‘straight’ scientist.” She adds: “I have a lot of natural creativity. I’m very artistic at home, I’m a very colourful person. It’s easy.”

This image of the creative, colourful, artistic blender is crucial to the ‘rum lady’ persona. While there can be no doubt that Spence loves what she does, and that she is very good at it, it is also clear that it’s an image which is carefully cultivated, and to great effect. And unlike the more personal anecdotes and stories, which are often told with a giggle and a gleam in the eye, there is more than one line delivered with a whiff of press release about it. Such as when she makes a point of talking about ‘all our great rums’, rather than just ‘our rums’. Or in her insistence that she only ever drinks Appleton and never the rum of a competitor – perhaps the rum industry is more cut-throat than that of other drinks, but I’ve never heard a similar attitude expressed by a brewer or gin distiller.

But that is the nature of the beast. Marketing counts for a lot in today’s drinks industry. If there is undoubtedly an element of PR about Spence’s media persona it is because, increasingly, the role demands it. Spence herself admits as much in a video interview for the Peruvian business newspaper Diario Gestión, when she notes that: “In the past 10 years a master blender also has to have good public relations skills. Historically master blenders used to just stay in their own little room and develop the blends, but now master blenders actually go out and promote the rum.” And Spence does this extremely well, with a media presence so significant that a random Customs officer could feel compelled to jump off his seat and shake her hand. He had seen her on a programme on the Travel Channel, one of her many television appearances.

Arguably it adds to, rather than takes away from, her success. A chemist, a sensory expert, an artist and a PR-savvy businesswoman – Spence is a 21st-century polymath at the top of her game. Tellingly, when I ask her how she keeps the job interesting , her focus turns to the business side of things: “When I visit countries for brand ambassador work, I always keep an eye out for what’s happening in the industry. You have to keep yourself fresh and abreast of industry developments.” When I ask how the job has changed for her, she goes back to marketing: “I understand much better the market and consumer preferences. You’re always learning. Even on the day I retire, I’ll still be learning.” When that day will be, she says she doesn’t know. Until then, she’ll keep treading the line between art and science.

Shop Appleton rum (affiliate link).

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