"The Rhum Orange is also great for after eating," opines Edgar Leal, the James Beard House-honored chef and owner of Miami's premier Nuevo Latino restaurant, Cacao. "Even the elegant bottle design makes you see you're having something special."

But regardless of quality, Ron Santa Teresa­ was verging on bankruptcy in 1998. "After my father left for the Vatican in 1995, a number of other people, not from the family, were running the company. There wasn't really an identity or an identification with the company," Henrique says. Sales were low, but overhead, in the form of too many employees, was high. "And we'd had a merger with a distribution company that basically imported whiskey and brands from abroad. They had a philosophy toward distribution, not production. And those two philosophies clashed. We were importing whiskey, Champagne, wine, tequila, everything, and this one powerful board member who had basically taken over Santa Teresa said rum wasn't a viable business."

Though Alberto and Henrique have always been close, they have different per­sonas. In looks as well as charisma, Alberto resembles a young, Latino John F. Kennedy: the dynamic dreamer. Bespectacled Henrique is a dead ringer for Stargate SG-1's studious yet studly archaeologist/linguist Dr. Daniel Jackson. Fluent in four languages, he's never at a loss for words: a facts/details guy. But in this family crisis, they saw eye to eye. And what they saw was red. "No," corrects Henrique. "Purple!"

So they proposed a coup. "We told our father we were positive that if we took over, sent everyone packing, and kept just rum, focused only on that, we'd be successful," explains Henrique. "If you saw the numbers for what you get for a case of rum and of whiskey, you have to sell two or three times more rum. So a lot of people said we were mad, that it was impossible, that we were going to go bust two months later. But here we are. The year we took over we had a 27 percent loss. The following year we had a 4 percent loss. The year [after that] it was [a] 14 percent profit. This year we closed at 22 percent profit."