On May 8, 1902, the Depaz family disappeared during the eruption of Mount Pelée, which also destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre. The only member of the Depaz family to escape the tragedy was Victor Depaz, then a young student living in Bordeaux, where he was studying. Once he had completed his studies, Victor Depaz, now an orphan and penniless, returned to Saint-Pierre to the Habitation Périnelle, where he had been born in 1886.
On the symbolic date of May 8, 1917, 15 years after the eruption, Victor Depaz bought the 521 hectares of fallow land at Habitation Pécou from the d'Aurigny family and started up the distillery he had built to crush the cane he was planting on the slopes of Mount Pelée.
He began construction of “Château Depaz,” a replica of Habitation Périnelle, where he had spent his childhood. He moved there with his wife and eight children in 1923. He would have eleven children in total.
Depaz rum won its first medal at the Marseille exhibition in 1922, then again in 1927 and 1931.
The reputation for quality of Depaz rum grew year after year under the leadership of Victor's sons, first Henri Depaz, then, from 1986, his twin brother André.
In 1989, André Depaz joined forces with the Bordeaux-based family group Bardinet, a long-standing customer of the Depaz Distillery, and continued the work begun by Victor Depaz, first with Bardinet and later with the new owner of La Martiniquaise.
