During an incursion of the Burning Valves clan, he picked up his staff, and walked out of his workshop to face the marauders' leader. He never complained, he minded his own business. He saw both the Black Roads raiders and the Bulwark knights come and go, after having done what they pleased with the villagers.

He tried to never get involved in any trouble or get too attached to anything. He was a mechanic, a lone worker of one of the smallest hamlets. Gunther always lived a rather serene, dull and solitary life. The Vagrant Seer is one of such champions. Among them it is possible to find genial inventors, brave explorer, cruel sellswords and even heroes. The marauding Black Roads clans send their warbands to raid the villages, the mutants from the Shifting Forest steal children for their King that Never Was and the knights of the Bulwark take those deemed worthy and pure of blood to their citadel, often forcefully.Īnd yet, not all the denizens of the Reaping Fields are hopeless and resigned to a cruel fate. As resource gathering activity started to fade, a new, sinister kind of reaping began: a cruel human harvest. Over the years, small villages made of junk began to sprout through the barren lands, while the valuable materials grew scarcer and scarcer. The Reaping Fields were so called by virtue of the abundant scraps of the old age that could be collected there. “I can’t wait.Sometimes, names do possess a strange kind of grim irony. “He’s been infusing the rum with fresh-roasted coffee beans and plans to make a black coffee rum,” she says. Now she’s looking forward to experimenting with Jean-Luc’s latest creation, still in the fledgling stage. A mainstay of the dessert menu is bread pudding topped with crème brûlée and bananas Foster, flamed with an ample amount of the Charboneau white. Regina’s current favorites are the old-fashioned and the Spring Fling (pictured at top), made with blueberry syrup and lemon, but she also uses the rum in the kitchen. Tours and tastings are available at the distillery, and cocktails featuring the rum are mixed at the restaurant by the Natchez-born Ricky Woolfolk, who learned his craft in Miami before returning home. “We’re definitely the most interesting strip mall in Mississippi,” Jean-Luc says, laughing, and he is not wrong. The fact that three businesses would operate at the same address meant that the Charboneaus had to request “strip mall” status from the city.

The rum is sold in the shop on the second floor of Kings Tavern next door (and online at ), along with cookbooks and Regina’s homemade jams and chutneys (including, naturally, Rum Punch Jelly). Meanwhile, Doug and Jean-Luc are already in search of land on which they can grow their own cane to make rhum agricole. Fortunately, a close friend’s family produces sugar at a mill near Jeanerette, Louisiana, just under two hundred miles away, so the rum is still a relatively “local” product. Though sugarcane was onceĪ viable crop in Mississippi, particularly in the areas around Natchez, less than a hundred acres are grown in the entire state today. While Regina composed a menu featuring wood-fired flatbreads and potpies (including a divine pork-belly version) topped with her signature bacon-thyme biscuit crust, Doug and Jean-Luc went to work on the formula for the rum, made with raw sugar, molasses, and Natchez’s much awarded municipal drinking water, which the Charboneaus purify through reverse osmosis. “All I did was walk into the building, and the wood-fired oven that was on its way to my house was rerouted.” “But I am possessed by the curse of vision.” The eminently charming 230-year-old building, built of sun-dried bricks and bargeboards from scrapped river flatboats, already had a restaurant kitchen from a previous incarnation (along with a raft of stories about the ghosts who inhabit the place). “I wasn’t planning to be part of the mix,” Regina says, laughing. When they discovered a circa-1900 former grocery store and bar, it seemed perfect-except that it came as a package along with Natchez’s oldest building, Kings Tavern. (The first, founded in 2010, was the Jackson-based Cathead, which makes vodka and gin.) Among the initial steps was to find a location downtown. Finally, in 2013, Doug and eldest son Jean-Luc decided to take the plunge, and Charboneau became the second-legal, that is-distillery in the state, which was the last to repeal Prohibition, in 1966.

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