2000. A chaotic year for Cuban cigars. A decade prior the Soviet Union had collapsed, and forty years of a Cuban economy propped up by subsidised sugar had come to an end. The last two tobacco harvests had been bad. Hurricanes Georges and Irene had flooded fields and demolished curing barns, and the crop was almost completely lost. The nineties had been a boom decade for cigars, and its legacy showed in Havana’s empty tobacco storehouses.

What was lacking most of all were the wrapper leaves. Traditionally, the wrapper for a Habano comes from a single large middle leaf of a shade grown plant, pale brown, and thinner than paper. In Havana in 2000, these were in short supply. They did, however, have a few of the upper leaves. Thicker and much darker, these sun exposed leaves were normally deemed unfit for the export grade Habanos, and were used instead for domestic cigars. But times were hard, and quotas had to be met.

This is the origin story of the Edición Limitada program. Those first four cigars, wrapped in thick, dark, and oily domestic wrapper leaves, pumped out to fill out a quota. Today, the program is considered a great success, and the black and gold bands signal high prices, low supply, and a good opportunity for a speculator to flip them at margin. Back in 2000 though, the sticks were priced very reasonably, and the bands were more of a scarlet letter. “Don’t worry too much about these” they read. “There aren’t many of them. They’re only here for a year.”

An ‘A’ size cigar is always a journey, and at 12:33 in the afternoon I touch the flame and begin this one, the Hoyo de Monterrey Particulares Edición Limitada 2000.

The first few centimetres surprise on all fronts: of an old cigar, of a giant cigar, and of a Hoyo de Monterrey, one expects mildness. Instead, the cigar is quite punchy, high medium tobacco notes, with burnt toast and charred mushroom. There is a touch of cedar, and just a little bitterness to the aftertaste.

The blue smoke curling ever upward, my memory strays to Victoria Sargent, the next in my half-decade long reminiscence of girls I liked in high school; of that which could have been, and wasn’t.

I first became aware of Victoria when we were fifteen or so. My school was boys only and she went to McRobinson’s, our all-girls sister school down the street. It was considered very cool to complain about how ugly the McRob girls were (“McDog” got thrown around a lot), and yet we all seemed to wind up dating them. My clique at school was the film geeks crew; a bunch of greasy dorks with long hair, who talked a lot about the twin idols of every teenage film nerd in the ‘90s, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. I wore a beret completely unironically on more than one occasion.

We were a band apart, but at parties there was a lot of overlap with a few of the other cliques who didn’t take scholarship too seriously: the stoners, the music club, and the theatre kids. The theatre kids’ parties were the ones you wanted to go to. The theatre kids did a lot of mixed productions, and the theatre kids knew girls.

At some point I had would up with a McDog of my very own. Minh Nguyen was short and squat, with bad skin and braces, and my friends teased me relentlessly for dating her. I was fifteen though and she smelled like shampoo and let me French her and that was good enough for me. Besides, those dudes were gay, anyway.

Minh wasn’t one of the theatre clique. I’d met her at one of their parties, but she was a film geek through and through. Somehow, she and a few of her friends managed to infiltrate themselves into our movie nights, where the etiquette remained unchanged, despite the addition of females. No drinking, no drugs, and no public displays of affection; just eight guys and three girls soberly watching art-movies until late, then all sleeping on somebody’s parent’s loungeroom floor.  Once the lights were out, the couples would exchange furtive caresses, while the others pretended to be asleep, and stifled giggles at any unconcealed noises.

A taken man, and still subscribed to the fairytale of monogamy, I would appreciate Victoria only from afar in those early days. Minh was very much a creature of this earth. Her short legs were purpose built for squatting in the gutter in a south-Asian market, and her powerful forearms were ideal for separating the heads from chickens with a cleaver. Victoria, by contrast, was an ethereal. Victoria was built for the lobbies of luxury hotels. She was tall and lithe, with perfect teeth and sparkling green eyes, and a smile that raised her high cheekbones and lit up her flawless white skin. She was a ballerina, trained since childhood, and the practice was evident in her every move. She glided across rooms. She reached for drinks en pointe. Usually at a theatre party I would be slumped in a beanbag in some darkened corner with the other movie nerds, when across the room I would catch Victoria throwing out a spontaneous arabesque, her friends laughing, and falling over trying to imitate her. Her form was perfect.

After high-school, and with Minh long behind me, I began to develop something of a friendship with Victoria. She went to a ballet university, and once in a while I’d see her clomping around the city in her leg warmers, and she would smile and hug me and if nobody was in a rush we’d get a coffee. When I saw her at parties we would always gravitate to each other, the two of us on a couch in some quiet room, our easy conversation flowing unceasingly. She always seemed to be dating a much older guy, or an athlete, or someone else beside whom I was grossly inadequate, but she was always polite enough not to mention him when we were together.

Eventually I would lose track of Victoria for a year or so, and somewhere in there I started dating Audrey (who, by the way, was also a McDog, although she was far too aloof and standoffish for even the theatre clique). Our relationship was about eight months in, and the cracks were starting to show a little, when out of the blue Victoria started chatting to me on MSN Messenger.

It turned out that I had lost track of Victoria for a reason: she was overseas. She had graduated from ballet school and, having already been rejected from all the big Australian ballet companies, had moved to London to try out for the European ones. She was alone, house sitting a flat that belonged to an aunt, and was lonely. Her days were filled with training, try-outs, and eventually rejection. She was struggling with the looming reality that most of those who devote their youth to a high aspiration must someday face: that she wasn’t going to make it. At 24, she would have to completely rebuild herself.

We talked most nights, often for hours. As ever, the conversation flowed easily and unceasingly, me about my life of IT drudgery, and her of her trails and fading dreams, and it began to become clear that she was developing a pretty big crush on me. She would send me pictures of her on her travels, en pointe in front of European landmarks. Once in a while there would be one that seemed like it was taken just for me, her in a leotard in her messy bedroom, an arabesque with perfect form. We made plans together, of things we would do when she came back, keeping a list of restaurants and bars and sights that we should see together. In my head I was doing the calculation of Victoria’s return date verses my lengthening cracks with Audrey. Of course, I was polite enough to never mention her to Victoria.

One night I found myself at bar with the old set, the film geeks, the stoners, the music club, and the theatre kids all strongly represented; mostly people I hadn’t seen in years. It was a farewell party for Julia, a theatre kid from way back, who was off on a European gap year. First stop: London. “Are you going to see Victoria?” I asked her. “Sure,” she replied. “I’m staying with her tomorrow night.” With her typical grace, Minh barged into the conversation. “Oh my God, Julia” she squawked. “Have you the goss about Alex? He’s dating Audrey Cates.”

Two nights later I saw Victoria online at the usual time, and sent her my normal greeting. I could feel her hurting through the screen. “You didn’t tell me you were dating Audrey Cates.” I fumbled a response: “Oh, didn’t I? Well, it’s not that serious.” It was to no avail. We were through. She never messaged me again.

The initial robustness of the Hoyo de Monterrey Particulares lasted longer than you’d expect, and even at the halfway there are still some signs of it. The Hoyo wood has arrived, as always, but there is a strong char to it – a campfire in a cedar forest. In the aftertaste is a sweetness that is not at all unpleasant. Although not as bad as either the Monte or the Party of the same vintage, the Particulares does suffer from the famous flame-retardant tobacco of the early 2000s. It has extinguished itself perhaps five times already, and been touched up a few others, and even when it remains lit I feel like I must puff more than usual in order to keep it so. I suspect that all this is keeping the coal too hot, and is probably the source of some of the cigar’s strength.

It was about three years later when I next saw Victoria. She had circulated an open invitation to her Facebook friends to come up to her family’s hobby vineyard to help with the annual harvest. I was probably the last person she was expecting to respond, but time had passed and wounds had healed, and when I messaged her to ask if I could come she said “sure.”

It was a big mistake.

In the intervening years, Victoria had given up on ballet, and like every person who gives up on something they love, had gone for the most practical choice possible. She was doing an Information Systems degree. The other takers for this winery invitation were three of her friends from uni, all nineteen-year-old guys. Worst of all, Victoria was clearly smitten with one of them.

Although Victoria and I were the same age, in the eyes of the others she was one of them and I was some random old man. In deference, I was given the front seat on the drive up, and watched jealously in the rear vision mirror as Victoria leaned into her beau far more than was necessary with each bend in the road. Once we had arrived at the farm, the four of them mostly ignored me, leaving me to chat with her brother and parents, while they gossiped about people in their course.

The bedroom we were to share had one bed and a few camping mattresses on the floor. “Victoria should have the bed” I declared, “it’s her place,” but the others we adamant it should be me. One of the guys snored loudly all night – loud enough to keep me awake, but not enough to drown out the sharp intakes of breath, and slurps and squeaks and moans and muffled giggles of Victoria and her guy exchanging furtive caresses on the floor below me.

The final twist of the knife came the next day. I was standing with Victoria and her mum, watching Victoria casually do a few barre exercises on the side of a plastic grape bin.

“Alex changed my life, y’know mum,” She remarked, offhandedly. “When I was in England we used to chat a bit, and he gave me the idea to go into IT. It just seemed like pretty easy work.”

By the three-quarter mark, the strength has faded out of the Particulares, and smoking it is a constant struggle. If I puff on the cigar to keep it lit then the coal will core. When I touch a flame around the edge to burn the wrapper, it will become too hot, and the flavour will be bitter tar. If I leave it a moment to let it cool, the cigar will extinguish itself, and I’ll need to relight it, and the process will begin again. Perhaps a more skilled smoker than I am could get something out of it, but for me it fluctuates between bitterness and tastelessness.

It is 4:45 in the afternoon by the time I finally lay it down, a little over four hours since the flame first touched the foot. It has never really been unpleasant at any point during the journey, but it also has never been easy. With a better wrapper I’d take this over two Epi. 1s, but as it stands it’s only really better for the novelty value.

A postscript: Years later, Victoria would wind up marrying Rod Plumber, another from the periphery of the old set (one of the stoners), and as undeserving a doofus as could win a girl like Victoria. Their courtship? She was working as a product manager at IBM, and he was doing a multi-month walking tour down the east coast of the US. He had downtime in the evenings, which coincided with the time when she was bored at work. They did a lot of chatting online.

Hoyo de Monterrey Particulares Edición Limitada 2000 on the Cuban Cigar Website

In 2003, when the Hoyo de Monterrey Piramide came into this life, the Edición Limitada program had yet to fully find its feet. Habanos was still releasing five EL cigars a year, one from each of the big marques, and none from the 2003 cohort are remembered especially fondly. The stand out is the Cohiba Double Corona, a cigar for which I have a very soft spot indeed, but even that is deeply overshadowed by the 2004 Sublime when people reminisce about the Cohiba limiteds of yesteryear.

The Hoyo de Monterrey Piramide I have with me today has been badly abused, having spent several weeks rattling around in the bottom of my day-bag, unloved and unhumidified. As a result, it is a bit on the dry side. The wrapper crackles when I roll it between my fingers. Lit, the initial notes are spicy; hay, with a dusty mushroom scent underneath, and most of all tobacco.

As I moved from my mid-twenties into my late-twenties, one by one the great bachelors started to disappear. Where once my weekends had runneth over with parties and card nights and trips to the dog-track, now, more and more, they stood empty. Where once a text sent into the ether on a Saturday night would have immediately discovered a brace of good-ol’-boys at a nearby bar, all delighted to welcome me amongst their number, now any such plea would come back two days later with “sorry mate, fell asleep early,” or “was at dinner with my wife’s family. Hope you had fun.”

And so it came to pass that by my thirtieth birthday I found myself with just a single bachelor friend left. T. Rex and I went back fifteen years, although we’d only been friends for ten. For the first three years I outright hated him. He grew on me through years four and five, before becoming a firm friend around the start of year six. T. Rex was an acquired taste, but also, he’d improved with age.

For the most part T. Rex’s problem was that he wasn’t great at reading a room. When a joke had run its course and everyone had finished laughing, T. Rex would always throw out one more zinger. Other times he’d make a crack that referenced some obscure piece of knowledge, and insist on explaining it at length. There were some landmine subjects that you needed to learn to avoid at all costs with T. Rex, because at the slightest whiff of a segue, he would deliver an insufferable lecture on them (European royal bloodlines were a particular favourite, but there were many, many others). I would get a lot of complaints about him when I invited him to parties.

By the end of my twenties though, T. Rex had sanded most of the corners off his obnoxiousness. Over the preceding half-decade, he had been on a perpetual self-improvement kick. He’d taken intonation lessons to liven up his monotone voice. Singing lessons had given him a karaoke setlist (mostly Chris Isaak, but it was something). He’d been to pick-up classes, and was very good at walking up to girls and saying some stupid shit and then turning that into a conversation. He was able to take them home more often that you’d expect. He was still obsessive and weird, and his room reading still wasn’t great, but he’d learned to go light on the royal bloodlines.

My thirtieth birthday party was sparsely attended, with most of the invitees texting in a last-minute excuse about kids been sick or having had “a hell of a day.” Amidst the rubble, T. Rex and I struck a deal. From now on, there would be no more Saturday nights wasted hanging around our bachelor pads. The great fear of every bachelor, that a routine slip-and-fall will lead to a lonely death and partial consumption by one’s housecat, would be eliminated for one night a week. We had a standing date for Saturday Night Bullshit.

Halfway through and the Petite Piramide has mellowed out to nothing. If I stoke the coal and blow the smoke out through my nose I can get a slight hit of tobacco spice, but in the normal course of things there is almost no flavour at all. A slight butteriness on the aftertaste. 

It didn’t take long for Saturday evenings to settle into a familiar routine. T. Rex and I would meet at my apartment around eight, wearing tuxedos. We would make ourselves at least three drinks from The Savoy Cocktail Book; classic cocktails, from an age before Midori, when drinks were mostly a question of whether you wanted sweet or dry vermouth in your gin. By about nine thirty we would be ready for some dinner, and would head to a restaurant where the staff, already starting to relax as their last customers finished their desserts, would roll their eyes as we strode through the door. “Table for two!”

After the restaurant, we would head to a bar or two. We liked the karaoke bars, most of which didn’t get busy until later in the evening, so we could get in a song or two without too long a wait. Sometimes we’d try a whisky bar, or whatever new cocktail place had come to our attention. It didn’t matter much. We were just killing time until midnight and last drinks at The Columbia Club.

In Melbourne, everybody knows that the coolest bars are found down alleyways, and The Columbia was down an alley off an alley. It was standing room only, capacity of ten. The staff were always quick to let you know that it was a classic cocktail bar, in the tradition of the 1920s. They didn’t sell vodka, they didn’t sell beer, there was no tequila, and you couldn’t have an anything-and-coke. There was a short menu of the usuals – Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Negroni, Aviation – but once you’d been there a few times you would generally just tell the bartender how you were feeling and they’d make something up for you. Drinks started at $22.

We became fixtures at the place: the guys in the suits who come around midnight. After two months we were exchanging knowing smirks with the bartenders whenever a drunk winced through the Americano they’d given him after denying his request for a rum and coke. After six months or so we were allowed to remain for a little while after closing for a couple of last amari on the house. After a year the bartenders would invite us out to a hospo bar afterwards, the kind of place that doesn’t really get started until bartenders and waitstaff get off work at 3:00am, and where the people would give us puzzled looks of semi-recognition.

Over three years and $15,000 in bar-tabs, T. Rex and I outlived many generations of Columbia bartenders, but as they worked in pairs there was always someone to let the new guy know that we were alright. The first to leave was Andre, a soft-spoken Spanish giant. Next was Henry, a hospitality lifer, who would tell us more than we wanted to know about his struggles with his battle-axe ex-wife, and who eventually left to open a bar even cooler than The Columbia Club (down two alleyways and up a fire-escape). Elsa was a boyish lesbian, who invited us to her art exhibition of nude self-portraits, modelled after ancient Greek athletic paintings, and showing off her impressive musculature. Florence was twenty, and filled with the radiant energy of the newly adult. She only lasted at the bar a few months, but after her departure she invited herself to my home one night, showing up at 11pm on a Wednesday. Together we shared at least twelve drinks, and she talked a lot about her boyfriend, before going home, apparently with no other intentions, an incident that still perplexes me to this day. Longest lasting of all was Rudy, Germain perfectionist, who introduced us to the Last Word and much else besides.

We were the most regular of regulars, and then we skipped a couple of weeks. I had a wedding, T. Rex had a family thing, and when we came back there were two guys behind the bar we had never seen before. “Good evening sirs, have you been here before? We’re just about to call last drinks. Do you know what a classic cocktail is?”

With that, the magic was gone. We’d spent thousands of dollars and endured a lot of hangovers, but in the end we were just two wankers in overstuffed monkey suits. The next week I told T. Rex I was busy while I stayed home, read for a while and went to bed early. The week after was the same, and the week after that. The week after that he stopped calling.

The bands come off the Petit Piramide. The tobacco level is still very light, with a slight vegetal taste, mild tannins, cedar, not much else. Put delicately, the cigar is delicate. A more forthright man might say it was flavourless.

I saw T. Rex just one more time after the end of the Bullshit. It was some years later, and I found myself in a karaoke bar we had been together from time to time. He was seated the corner with half-a-dozen Chinese people, drinking whiskey and green-tea. He wore a salmon pink dinner jacket that I remembered from when it was an immaculately tailored garment worn by a man at his wrestling weight; today he bulged out of it, the sleeves tight around the shoulders, and a roll of white bellyfat visible where his shirt buttons buckled open. Clinging to his side was what I took to be his new girlfriend, her face as flat and broad as the Yangtze floodplain she had so recently departed. I watched him for a while. He didn’t seem to see me. For the most part he just started vacantly in to the middle distance, his expression only interrupted by a grimace every time his girl shouted mandarin into his ear. The closest he came to an emotion was when she tried to feed him cake from a spoon. “No!” He snapped at her. “Too many carbs!”

When his song finally came on, he took the stage and belted it out with the same passion he always had, while his girlfriend vogued behind him, her friends yelling at her to pose for a photo. Finally, he acknowledged her presence, looking right at her as he howled the chorus. “What a wicked game you play” he sang. “To make me feel this way.”

As he left the stage I approached him, and we chatted for a minute. “Nice girl,” I said “been together long?”
   “Oh, six months or so. She’s actually going back to China next week… her visa ran out. I’m going to bring her back on the spouse ticket though… just need a couple of months to sort out the paperwork.”
   “Oh, congrats man. Another one bites the dust. Last of the great bachelors.”

He smiled a vague sort of smile and went back to his table.

A few months later word arrived that T. Rex had passed. He’d slipped while carrying some glassware down the stairs, and bled out on the living room floor. They didn’t find him for more than a week. No word on the housecat.

In 2018 the Hoyo Petite Piramide is probably dead. When great cigars sail beyond the sunset – think an old Lanceros or 1492 – they can become light and delicate. With the tar and bitterness of the tobacco all gone, they reveal new and complex flavours; milk, vanilla, egg white, and honey; notes that would be drowned out in a younger cigar. When lesser puros make the same journey, they can be flat and unpleasant, with ash, old newspaper, and musty attic notes. The Petite Piramide falls somewhere in-between. It’s not unpleasant, but there’s not a lot too it. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. They aint getting any younger.

Still better than an Epicure No. 1.

Hoyo de Monterrey Piramide Edición Limitada 2003 on the Cuban Cigar Website