Some distilleries are born from spreadsheets.
Others start because the world suddenly stops working the way it used to.
When I spoke with Hugo Gallardo for The Global Glug, what became clear very quickly is that Alma Distillery was never meant to exist in Sicily at all. The original plan was somewhere far warmer and far more predictable: the Philippines. Hugo, his wife Annalisa Spadaro, and their partner Alejandro Lopez had already set things in motion. Company created, land secured on the island of Palawan, and a simple vision — a small distillery, a restaurant, a few huts, and a quieter life working with travelers instead of office deadlines.
They even left their jobs in Milan to make it happen.
Then the world closed.
Borders shut down, flights disappeared, and the Philippines became unreachable almost overnight. What was supposed to be a short stay in Sicily with Annalisa’s family turned into an indefinite pause. Hugo suddenly found himself stuck on the island with time, a bit of money originally meant for another continent, and the uncomfortable realization that waiting around forever probably wasn’t the best strategy.
That’s when an old piece of history quietly resurfaced.
While reading about agricultural history, Hugo stumbled onto something most people — even in Sicily — rarely think about. Centuries ago, the island had a real sugar industry. Between roughly the 7th and 13th centuries, sugarcane was cultivated across parts of Sicily and processed locally. At one point it was among the significant producers of sugar in the known world.
Then the Atlantic opened.
Once sugarcane reached the Canary Islands, Madeira, and eventually the Caribbean and the Americas, Sicily simply couldn’t compete anymore. Climate, labor costs, scale — everything favored the new colonies. Over time the crop disappeared entirely.
But the idea stayed in Hugo’s head.
If sugarcane once grew here… could it grow again?
That question slowly stopped being theoretical.
Finding sugarcane in Europe, especially during the pandemic, turned into something of a small adventure. Hugo began calling farmers, nurseries, anyone who might have a clue. Eventually he gathered several varieties to test. One came from a Sicilian grower connected to an early rum project on the island. Another was tracked down in southern Spain, where commercial sugar production surprisingly survived until 2006. A few others came from Italian nurseries.
Not all of them worked.
In the end, two varieties proved resilient enough to move forward with. Today they simply call them red cane and yellow cane.
Alma now cultivates around three hectares of sugarcane near Modica. In global rum terms that’s microscopic, of course, but scale was never really the point. What’s more interesting is how they farm it. Yields sit roughly around 75 to 80 tons per hectare, which is respectable but still far from the industrial output you see in places like Brazil or Colombia, where production can reach around 120 tons.
That difference isn’t accidental.
They deliberately leave more space between the rows, use fewer chemicals, and accept more manual work in the fields. The goal isn’t maximum tonnage — it’s healthier plants and better raw material. In other words, decisions made with the distillery in mind rather than the commodity market.
And the raw material really does behave differently depending on the variety.
The red cane tends to produce a spirit that feels surprisingly refined. Floral aromas show up early, sometimes white fruit, occasionally something that reminds you of pear or apricot, along with hints of Mediterranean herbs.
The yellow cane, on the other hand, has a completely different personality. Hugo mentioned that even the fresh juice carries savory notes — olives, brine, something almost coastal. It’s the kind of profile that instantly makes rum geeks curious because it suggests the fermentation and distillation are starting with a very expressive base.
Instead of blending everything immediately, Alma decided to lean into that difference. Their early releases include a rum made from red cane, another from yellow cane, and a blend of the two. It’s a logic that feels closer to wine than to traditional rum marketing, but it makes sense when you control the agriculture yourself.
In fact, agriculture is so central to the project that Hugo describes sugarcane as the thread connecting everything they do. The distillery doesn’t only produce rum. They also make gin — and even there the cane appears again, used as one of the botanicals. It’s a small detail, but it reveals a lot about how they think. The cane isn’t just a raw material; it’s the identity of the distillery.
They’re also developing a botanical rum built around local plants, again using their own rum as the base. Sicily, after all, is basically a playground for anyone interested in flavors: herbs, citrus, grains, grapes, all within short distance of each other.
Which brings us to the still.
Their setup reflects the experimental nature of the project: a hybrid still combining a pot still with a small six-plate column. The plates can be engaged or bypassed, allowing them to adjust how the spirit behaves during distillation. They can run double distillations, single passes, or variations in between.
After experimenting with different configurations, Hugo told me they currently prefer a single pass through the column for their cane juice rum. Simply put, it preserves more aroma. And when you’re farming the cane yourself, aroma is kind of the whole point.
The rum itself is bottled at fairly serious strengths. The core expressions sit comfortably above 50% ABV — around the low-to-mid fifties depending on the batch. It’s not meant as a statement; it’s just where they think the spirit tastes right.
Aging is another area where they’re experimenting carefully. They’ve been working with 220-liter barrels, including ex-wine casks in both American and European oak. But the goal isn’t extremely long maturation. Hugo is quite open about that: when you believe your raw material is interesting, you don’t necessarily want wood to dominate the conversation.
Sicily itself adds a curious twist to the whole aging discussion. It sits somewhere between tropical and continental conditions. Winters can drop to around five degrees Celsius, while summers can climb past forty. That kind of temperature swing creates a maturation environment that’s neither Caribbean nor northern European — something in between, and potentially quite interesting over time.
It’s one of the reasons Hugo is tempted to run more experiments, possibly even with molasses in the future, just to see what the island’s climate might do to it.
Ironically, despite the project being rooted so deeply in Sicily, one of the first major markets for Alma turned out to be the United States. Like many modern spirits stories, the connection started online. Samples were sent, someone tasted them, introductions happened, and suddenly pallets were heading across the Atlantic.
Italy itself requires a bit more storytelling.
Bartenders usually understand immediately. Give them something new and they’ll start playing with it. The harder part is explaining rum to the average drinker. The category is messy. Molasses rum, cane juice rum, different fermentation styles, different traditions, different rules depending on where you are in the world.
Compared to whisky, rum can feel almost chaotic.
But that chaos is also the fun part.
Listening to Hugo talk about Alma, you get the sense that the distillery exists somewhere between curiosity and stubborn optimism. It’s the kind of project that might never begin if you fully understood all the complications waiting ahead — the agriculture, the bureaucracy, the experimentation.
But sometimes not knowing is an advantage.
You start anyway.
And occasionally that leads to sugarcane quietly returning to a place where it disappeared centuries ago.
Not a bad outcome for a pandemic detour.
