Rum, Sex, Yoga

The year 2007 was a banner one for Jacquie Gréaux (pronounced GRAY-oh). The Marin-based yoga teacher and health guru broke boundaries by releasing not only the provocatively titled book Better Sex Through Yoga (Broadway) but also Batiste, her own brand of rum.

Or rather, I should say, rhum, which is the spelling in French-speaking islands of the Caribbean, such as St. Barth’s, which is where both Gréaux, a trim and athletic blonde in her late 30s, and her rum originate. Furthermore, Batiste is a rhum agricole—a unique style of rum made with sugarcane that’s become hip among bartenders and other cognoscenti (see MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s “favorite obscure liquor” in a recent New York Times profile).

Only about 5 percent of the world’s rum is made from fresh sugar­cane juice, rather than molasses (a byproduct of industrial sugar production). The use of fresh cane makes a different kind of spirit, one in which the organic, grassy aromas come through as well as that beautiful, sweet smell of sugar. It makes a spirit that doesn’t require the additional component of barrel aging to attain complexity.

The only issue is that these rums can tend to be too herbaceous for people reared on rums like Bacardi. But Batiste, which is smoother and mellower than many agricole rums, manages to pull it off. Though distilled in the Caribbean, Batiste is shipped to California in bulk for rectification (the term distillers use for purification), a part of the process that Gréaux refuses to describe, citing “trade secrets.” Whatever the method is, it works. Batiste is smooth, pure and elegant.

Being so into health, Gréaux (who moved to SF in 1993 to study Chinese medicine at SFSU) isn’t much of a drinker. But it wasn’t her own craving for rhum agricole that spurred her to create Batiste. Rather, it was her fondness for the culture of St. Barth’s. Jean-Batiste was the name of her grandfather, who was a rum distributor in the islands. Her fond recollections of him, plus happy memories of her family and friends drinking rum, motivated Gréaux to start the brand. “What goes on around rum in St. Barth’s is truly a delight. The conviviality. The sharing. Storytelling. Celebration. It’s poured at every event,” she says.

Sex and drink aren’t part of the clean living we usually associate with yoga, and breaking that association has been part of Gréaux’s mission. “I hope that my book and rum can help change some of the perceptions out there that yoga has to be this austere, pure, black-and-white concept,” she says. “I know yoga-studio owners with whom I’ve gone through a glass of Batiste and then done yoga poolside.”

In the Bay Area, where most anything goes, Batiste has found a good home. As she puts it: “I can’t think of any place in the world that loves its food, yoga, sex and drink as much as San Francisco does.”