‘I have been living the label’: David Flint Wood on how art imitates life with his new Idle Assembly rum.
David is excited. He’s in New York staying with his brother while his wife, designer, entrepreneur, author and former model (I know. New Year’s Resolution: just do more) India Hicks is off doing trunk shows. That evening, she was giving a speech at the Ukraine Institute about raising money for the global empowerment mission she works with.
David, on the other hand, is keen to talk about rum. His passion is so strong - perhaps an inevitable by-product of living in The Bahamas - that he’s created his own: Idle Assembly. It’s a premium blend of rums from Trinidad, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Panama, crafted by a third generation family of blenders in Columbia and aged in ex-bourbon white oak barrels for between 5 and 20 years. No idling here, ‘these are grown-up things’ and he’s thrown his hat into the ring with the pros.
‘Its DNA is completely my life for the past 30 years’, David muses. He and India live with various of their five children on Harbour Island, which sounds totally idyllic.
‘You know we have this ludicrous pink sand beach - people always think we’re making it up but it really is the colour of peach skin. And then we’ve got a very pretty old settlement full of colonial clapboard houses; it’s like those whaling villages on the Eastern Seaboard of America. Like an explosion in a watercolour set. It is pretty. It’s very pretty. We’re very lucky.’
David moved there after ditching and being ditched from various ad agencies in the 90s. But just as I find myself being fooled by his wry self-deprecation, it transpires that ‘in 1994 or something, I won the Marketing Society Ad Campaign of the Year. And then about a year later, I was a barman on an island nobody had ever heard of. I ran away from a perfectly good job at Saatchi’s’. For someone who describes himself as ‘naturally indolent’, I wonder how much courage, energy and fire in the belly it took to make this move.
‘I think it was one of those things where at 35 or whatever I was, you think, well if you’ve got a chance to run an eight room hotel on a coconut island, you should probably give it a go. Otherwise I’ll be 40, standing on the Tottenham Court Road with a bag full of rejected ads by some marketing department, being flashed by the buses going past in November. And I’ll probably throw myself under one. I thought it seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do. My friends all thought I’d gone mad.’
India turned up a few months later. They had met when she was 14, ‘not in the biblical sense’, and then lost touch. ‘We had a Casablanca moment when she walked into my bar, and now 28 years and 5 children later, we are rather stuck with each other’. This story seems too romantic to be true, as does their recent picture-perfect wedding, after nearly three decades of spurning convention and living in sin. Shock, horror. The wedding was a leftfield move, and therefore perfectly in-keeping with all things Flint Wood. It’s impossible not to like him.
I love the idea of the rum capturing the essence of David’s life. Joel Harrison’s tasting notes are diligent and evocative, with talk of light ginger and orange blossom, toasted coconut, oak spices, bergamot and sandalwood. And that’s just the aroma. David is rightly proud of the hard work he and co-founder, Edinburgh-based fund manager Roger Nisbet, have put in.
‘This was meant to be fun! A fun little project in later life, and I suddenly realised how much hard work fun is.’
Idle Assembly has only been properly running for eight months and David and Roger do everything, apart from the bottling, which happens in Scotland. Their Instagram is flavoured with David’s signature wit and joie de vivre, and I am not surprised to learn it is penned by his own hand. They do, however, have an illustrious set of ‘ambassadors’, including actor Brooke Shields, ‘who are great advocates for the stuff. They don’t just like the rum, but like to talk it up for us’.
The name comes from a sign near his house, leftover from British colonial law, banning gathering in public without purpose, and the label was designed by his son, Felix. It dreamily captures the glamorous era of the 1950s and 60s. ‘The Family Islands of The Bahamas particularly were opened up by the original jet-setters, in seaplanes and on yachts. The Errol Flynn, Carey Grant, Hemingway kind of time.’ Change it to the 2020s, add Hicks and Flint Wood onto the list, and you’re laughing.
Currently available online, at Fortnum and Mason, Hedonism and plenty of ‘pretty discerning bars and restaurants’, I think we’ll be seeing, and hopefully drinking, a lot more of Idle Assembly in the future.
December, 2023
