Cuaba Piramides Edición Limitada 2008

Posted on May 13, 2015 by atgroom under Cuaba, Edición Limitada

very season of The Harem needs a whipping boy, a cigar that I can lambast as tasting of burning garbage or as having the acrid notes of chemical spill – it helps to preserve my reputation as an unbiased critic that doesn’t buy into the hype. Well, if there is to be a whipping boy this season, this might well be the one: the 2008 Edición Limitada from the loathsome Cuaba. Then again, perhaps not: of all the Cuaba cigars, this is the only one that I don’t recall ever hearing a bad word about.

Fun fact about Cuaba: Habanos occasionally cribs words from the Taino Indians (the pre-Columbian inhabitants of Cuba, functionally extinct thanks to some fairly vigorous genocide by Christopher and his colonial crew). One such word is Cohiba, the term for their proto-cigars; another is Cuaba, the term for a burning hunk of wood that they would yank from a fire to light their Cohibas. It remains a fairly apt descriptor of the best use for most Cuaba cigars.

The piramides begins reasonably: a little bitter at the outset, it quickly mellows into something that, while not smooth, is not totally unpleasant. It’s a rough, vaguely grassy mid tobacco. The cigar seems to have a lot of trouble staying lit, and I have to relight it four or five times within the first inch. I have no idea why, as 2008 is long past the era of fireproof wrappers that marred the early 2000s, and this particular example has spent a few days in a dry box that should have taken any excess humidity out of it. The draw is perfect and, when it is burning, the smoke volume is heavy, discounting a plug or anything of that nature. I did give my standard rinse before lighting, but that has never seemed to do burns any harm in the past.

I’m drinking Pusser’s navy rum, a very amicable drop with a nice orange aftertaste. For three centuries the British Navy issued its sailors a daily tot of rum – a practice that was ended (to the consternation of many a hardened mariner) in 1970. Pusser’s rum is supposedly the same stuff that was served to seamen, being rums from Jamaica, Barbados, the West Indies and the British Virgin Islands, all blended together to the Admiralties’ ancient recipe. It’s a slightly dubious distinction: is the fact that a drink was enjoyed when served free to generations of men barely over drinking age really a mark of quality? Perhaps so: a few years ago I passed through Edinburgh and spent an hour or so wandering HMY Britannia, the Queen’s old sloop, and took note that there were six fully stocked bars on display therein: one for every class of sailor and a few extra for the royal family. If anyone takes their drinking seriously, it’s the British Navy.

By the midpoint the Cuaba Piramides is actually a good cigar. It has mellowed out to light tobacco with dusty straw. There is a very mild woodiness, and something of the armour of sap. A generous man might attribute some leather. It leaves a distinctly salty taste on my lips.

The first bar I encountered on the Britannia was in the captain’s private dining room, a small wood panelled chamber at the top of the ship. I came in just as a tour group was leaving and, having ridden the elevator up alone, I knew that I would have at least a few minutes to myself before anyone came in behind me. Sitting on the bar, only a foot or so beyond the velvet rope, was the distinctive spiked decanter of a bottle of Louis XIII cognac. The first thought that went through my head was that any job where you are issued with a presumably limitless supply of $2000 brandy is not such a bad lark; the second was that I was obligated to lift it. I glanced around for cameras and saw none. I went to the window and checked the gangway: nobody was coming. I stuck my head out the door and saw that the last of the tour group were already in the next room. Finally, confident that the coast was clear, I violated the sanctity of the velvet rope and reached for the bottle. My hand on the decanter, the criminal act came to a swift end. The bloody thing was glued down. No doubt it was filled with tea. My caper aborted I slunk off down the corridor to the officer’s mess, and kept my thieving hands to myself for the rest of the tour, but it wouldn’t be the last time that an unsecured bottle of Louis XIII proved too great a temptation for my criminal heart.

It was about a year later and I was staying in the business wing of a Chinese Holiday Inn. I’m not sure why I was booked in the business wing – I guess by some definition I was a business man – but the main distinction of the business wing is that it’s not as good as the regular hotel. You do get access to the business centre, and the Wi-Fi is free, but you lose access to the pool and the restaurant is in a whole other building. The chief advantage as far as I can tell is the private bar area which, on a good night, is filled exclusively with people travelling on business and looking to have one-night stands with like-minded strangers. At the time of my stay however, the bar was closed, defended by a velvet rope to which someone had sticky taped a “closed for renovations” sign. I gave it a cursory glance, but no renovations were evident.

Late on the evening of my third and final night in the Holiday Inn I arrived back at the hotel a good deal worse for wear. My Chinese colleagues had thrown a banquet in my honour, and I had already had a decent amount of beer when my boss half-jokingly suggested that I had to do a shot of baijiu with every member of the party. I could have gotten out of it; I had seen the same suggestion made to several others, and they had all nominated a designated drinker, or poured themselves half shots, or offered to do it with beer instead or made some other excuse. Not me though. My blood was up, and the only thought in my mind was “I’ll show these Chinamen what Western Imperialist drinking power looks like.”

Baijiu is horrible alcohol, as strong as Chartreuse, and even at the topmost shelf the best you can really hope for flavour wise is watered down mineral turpentine. When I staggered out of the elevator that night in front of the shuttered business wing bar, I was looking for something, anything really, to take the taste of wretched baijiu out of my mouth. It was like a sign from the heavens: on the top shelf of the bar the crystal decanter was illuminated softly green by the neon light from the Holiday Inn sign outside the window. It was an unsecured bottle of Louis XIII.

I didn’t hesitate for one second. I hopped over the rope and strode straight behind the bar. I looked around for a glass, but the racks were empty, their glasses removed during the renovations. There was nothing else for it: I upended the bottle and suckled straight from the $2,000 teat, two quick pulls of about a shot each. I think it was nice, but I was far too loaded to appreciate it, and my tastebuds were ruined from an evening drinking light gasoline. I returned the decanter and headed for my room. From conception to flight the crime had taken less than thirty seconds.

In any event, the moral of the story is that crime doesn’t pay: the hasty double broke the camel’s back and I spent the next hour or so throwing up in the bath.

In the final third the Piramides begins to betray a few notes of that classic Cuaba flavour: tar, ash, and rubber, but it never gets too bad and I wind up taking it all the way to the hilt. Not a great cigar, and definitely not a great limited edition, but it is an acceptable mid-range and by far the best Cuaba I’ve ever had. We’ll need to find another whipping boy. I’ll try and dig out one of their regular production.

It’s a league better than the Salomónes.

Cuaba Piramides Edición Limitada 2008 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Selección Privada Edición Limitada 2014

Posted on April 29, 2015 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Partagás

Of the three brand retrospectives that have composed the majority of the harem, my sophomore effort was by far the weakest. At the time of writing fully seven Partagás cigars were missing, and for the most part the absentees weren’t even that exotic: I could have obtained at least a few of them by walking into a local brick and mortar retailer and handing over some folding cash. The list was incomplete mainly because I was lazy, and for that I apologise. As a small contrition today I offer you the Partagás Selección Privada, Edición Limitada 2014. There is a case to be made that it’s too early to smoke a cigar like this. Havanas used to ship with a note that said they should be smoked either immediately or after at least a year, and much has been written about sick periods, acclimatization times and so on. Then again, much has also been written about how modern limited editions are designed to be smoked straight off the boat, and don’t age as well as the old ones did. When all is said and done these cigars are less than a year old and still widely available: if I decide it hasn’t reached its potential I can always walk into a store and buy another one.

I light the cigar and it begins very well, light and creamy with a strong bean note, cocoa and coffee. After a centimetre or so it becomes peaty – wet earth and charcoal. When I’m down at the compound I will often have a fire in the evening and leave it to burn itself out overnight. In the morning the fire pit will contain nothing but snow white ash but will still be hot, and if I throw a few sticks on it it will immediately begin to smoulder again. If I’m staying another night I will use the heat to cook my lunch, but if not I will usually get a hose and a shovel and water the coals as I turn them. Great clouds of steam billow up, and a very specific scent fills the air; the scent I am getting from this cigar. All the best things trigger sense memories.

I like oysters for precisely the same reason. There’s nothing inherently pleasant about them: it’s tricky and undignified slurping them off the shell, and the slimy yet chewy corpuscular texture is nothing to write home about (a very shady Russian ‘businessman’ I shared a few shots with in a Japanese coastal resort one night once told me that he liked to see people eating raw oysters because “anyone who can swallow a raw oyster can swallow a condom full of heroin,” a piece of street knowledge I’ve retained but never had cause to use). The taste, though, is precisely the melange of dead birds, seaweed, and salt that I used to smell on the beaches of my childhood as I poked around the rock pools at the bases of the Mornington Peninsula’s sandstone cliffs.

At the mid-point the cigar is much the same as it was an inch in: a deeply earthy, rich and creamy smoke. Tar, tobacco and nicotine are all very light. Some might regard this lack of a change in flavour as a negative, but the one note is a deeply complex and enjoyable one, so I’m not too bothered. A really first rate smoke.

At one point in my life I had the misfortune to find myself in a mussel eating contest. It was Australia Day, my nation’s national holiday, which falls at the height of our summer. Like many Australia Days it was stinking hot, 45 degrees in the shade, and I was at an outdoor beer café with my friends. It was a big venue that took up about a quarter of a city block, and maybe 500 people were crammed into the place. The trestle tables with the umbrellas were long gone by the time we got there, as were the premium spots under the trees, so my friends and I sprawled out with the unwashed masses on blue tarpaulins in the full gaze of the sun. Some radio station or other was running a stage and, in between musical acts and banter from the disc jockeys, the feature entertainment of the day was the mussel eating contest. There were to be six heats in all, with six contestants per heat, the winner of each heat getting a small prize and an entry in the final to compete for the grand prize of a $1,000 bar tab. It was heat four by the time the leggy blonde with the clipboard arrived at our tarp to see if anyone wanted in, and with four beers inside me I couldn’t resist her sales-model charms. Ten minutes later I was on the stage.

It didn’t seem so bad at first. We were each given a bowl with fifty mussels in a brine soup: the first person to finish was the winner. “I’ve eaten things before” I thought to myself. “Matter of fact, I’ve been doing it for years. How hard can it be?”

I was about ten shellfish in when the commentator made a derogatory comment about my speed, and I glanced up to see how the others were doing. It quickly became clear that they wanted it more. To win a mussel eating contest you really have to put your body on the line: my opponents on either side of me both had chins ripped raw from slurping the creatures directly off the shells, and were way ahead of me with my comparatively dainty technique of plucking each one out with my fingers. From then on I was only in it for the lunch, and by the time I finished the prizes were already being awarded. I was placed a notional fourth, only because fifth and sixth couldn’t get through their bowl.

It was some hours and numerous pints later, and the place had cleared out considerably when I heard my name being called over the PA system. I wandered over to the stage to see what was up, and the leggy blonde informed me that the top three placers from my heat had gone home and I had made the final. My stomach churned at the thought, but my blood alcohol level and her very white teeth got the better of it, and yet again I found myself on the stage with fifty mussels before me. As the disc jockey gave his spiel I checked out my opponents: none of them looked like they wanted to be here. “Alright, Groom” I thought, “this is it. You don’t deserve this opportunity, but fate has given it to you. Now is the time to shine. Now it the time to put your body on the line. A few scratches on your chin will heal, but $1,000 is a big deal. You’ll be a hero to your friends. You’ll see your enemies driven before you. This is it. Do or die. Step up.”

I got about fifteen mussels in before I threw up and the bouncers tossed me out.

By the last inch and a half of the Selección Privada I’m spitting occasionally and have cracked open a beer to wash the tar away a bit. It’s not terrible, but is a full nicotine and tar bomb. Peat bog would be the only flavour note I could nominate. I purge it vigorously enough that the wrapper splits, which works to some extent, getting rid of most of the tar and leaving a toasty sort of flavour. Slightly burnt wholemeal. Perhaps a sign of its youth, the cigar has had burn issues throughout: although it has been very sharp and straight, it has required four or five relights.

Right now this is a very good cigar. It might be better in a year, but I wouldn’t wait five. Sits below the anniversary cigars but above most of the other ELs in the Partagás lineup.

Partagás Selección Privada Edición Limitada 2014 on the Cuban Cigar Website.

H. Upmann Robusto Edición Limitada 2012

Posted on January 28, 2015 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, H. Upmann

There are certain voices in the cigar aficionado community that loudly decry the Edición Limitada series, and particularly their trademark dark wrappers, which they (the aficionados) contend make them (the cigars) all taste the same. Perhaps as the years go by and the Harem begins to develop strong horizontals (reviews of every cigar produced in a particular year) in addition to its verticals (every cigar produced in a particular brand), I will be able to provide a conclusive position on one side or the other, however, for the moment I must content myself that for all their faults, the EL wrappers look gorgeous, and the 2012 H. Upmann Robusto is no exception: dark and rich and smooth, a fine cylinder of the best ebony.

The first notes are spicy, hot on the tongue. There is a strength here, full tobacco, and rich aromatic saddle leather. Once it settles down a bit there is a hint of cocoa and Mexican black bean. Within the first centimetre or so the thick umami of shiitake mushrooms emerges. This is shaping up to be something special.

Like most young men I have occasionally found myself in love, and like all young men in love, I have occasionally found myself heartbroken. It was London in July and she was gone. The whole damn city stank of her, her perfume oozing out of the Underground, that oppressive womb that worms beneath the old town, and permeating the streets and parks and most of all my room beneath the stairs in a Paddington flophouse. I had once found that smell so comforting: six months earlier and a continent away I used to place a scarf she’d worn on my pillow, so that her scent and my dreams of our future together could lull me to sleep. Now it sickened me. There was a serpent in my stomach and a boulder on my shoulders. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. The galleries and museums held nothing for me, so I just wandered the streets aimlessly day and night. My beard was growing out, but I spent an hour or more each day lying face down on the shower floor, so at least I was clean. When I went to a pharmacist and asked for something to settle my stomach she tried to nail me down on symptoms.
“Is it acid?” she asked. “Or gas? Perhaps a virus?”
“No, no” I replied. “It’s just love.”
She didn’t have a pill for that.

Eventually I split for Paris, taking rooms across from the Gare du Sud, and in a nearby café I managed my first food in a week, a pain au chocolat. Everything in Paris was an improvement: the wine was cheaper, the weather warmer, the food better, and her smell was drowned out by the cheese shops and the garbage heaps. During the day I was largely cured, but at night, once the shadows lengthened in the narrow streets, I found the City of Lights to be haunted by an altogether different ghost, and my malaise returned. Running low on options I took the only logical step: I headed for Disneyland.

About an hour on the train from central Paris, Eurodisney, or Disneyland Paris as it is known these days, is among the least of the world’s Magic Kingdoms. The problem is that the French just don’t take things as seriously as the Americans (or the Japanese for that matter). My ticket was dispensed with the same sneer that accompanies most acts of customer service in France, and while the waitress who told me that the register was broken and that I wouldn’t be able to eat at the Lone Star Saloon that day was certainly flummoxed by her predicament, she was also totally unapologetic. At no point did anybody take the time to wish me a magical day.

I’ve never quite understood what children see in Disneyland, and honestly, the place would be vastly improved without them. For children a day there is about seven hours of standing in lines screaming and an hour or so of riding rides. To a solo adult rider like me though it’s not such a bad time. I take a book to read while standing in the lines, which are usually shorter because I’m alone and can fill in the empty seat next to a group of three. The food is good, and they sell beer. I enjoy the nuances of the design of the place, the little details and jokes hidden in every ride, and I like to try and spot the concealed doors and functional elements that make the whole place work. There is a special atmosphere in Disneyland that you don’t find anywhere else on earth; perhaps it’s because of the constant subtle background music, or the unrelenting attention to detail, or maybe it’s the chemicals they pump out into the air, but the unreality of the place just makes me feel happy. It’s the perfect destination for the heartbroken.

At around 9:30 they had the parade, and at 10:00 the fireworks, and after that the Galician peasantry began to thin considerably. I always save my favourite ride, Space Mountain, until last, and after 10:00 there are not even enough passengers to fill one shuttle, so you can ride it several times without disembarking. If you close your eyes while you’re in the lobby they adjust enough to the dark of the ride that you can see the track and maintenance gantries. With my final ride complete, I took one last lap of the park and grabbed a crepe in Main Street. The midnight parade was just wrapping up, so I lingered a moment to admire the French Jasmine and Ariel, before finally calling it a day, cramming my mouse ears into my pocket, and heading for the train station.

The station was totally dark, the doors locked, and a sign in French indicated that there hadn’t been a train here for some time. I considered my options. There were a row of taxis parked in the nearby plaza, but across the way a group of people were waiting at what appeared to be a bus terminal, and loath to fork out the taxi fare all the way back to Paris, I wandered over there. I inspected the signs thoroughly as several buses came and went, but did not find in any of them a destination I recognised. Finally one arrived that had a picture that looked remotely like a train on it, and the name of a station I thought I remembered passing through on the journey up. “Ah” I thought “I’ll go there. The trains must only run all the way to Disney until a certain hour, after which they stop part way up the line and this bus connects you.”

I handed the bus driver a 10 euro note, and when he asked me something replied “le gare… fin… le fin gare.” He looked at me with contempt, but handed over eight euro or so in change. The route meandered through the dark streets of the Parisian suburbs slowly, stopping regularly to let off another of my ten or so fellow passengers, and I became increasingly anxious as it became clear that this was not the popular and direct bus to the station that I had anticipated. Finally I was the only passenger left, and the bus driver began to drive quicker, everything dark outside. Eventually he stopped and open the door. “Fin” He yelled “Out.” He barely waited for me to alight before speeding off.

I considered my surroundings. A single fluorescent light flickered above a hard bench in the bus shelter, which was situated in the centre of a giant, empty parking lot. Off in the distance was a building that I presumed to be the station and a few shops, all unlit and plainly closed. I listened for some sound of humanity, but found nothing. No voices. No passing cars. No busy roads. Nothing. I checked my phone. No data. I sat on the bench and contemplated my options. As I saw it they were twofold, and neither was much good: I could wander randomly out into the night and hope that I found a taxi or kindly citizen before a gang of French street toughs, or I could sleep on this bench. I spent the next twenty minutes composing a text message to my two nearest friends, one across the channel in Bristol, the other in Berlin. They both began the same way: “I’m fucked.”

At the midpoint the cigar is thick and earthy, with rich dirty espresso and cocoa bean. A bit of a squalling breeze has sprung up, and despite spending its time between puffs in my lee, in a fort I have made for it with my jacket, I am unable to stop the cigar burning a little hot. If anything, this cigar seems a little young: five more years are needed to take the edge from the richness. I’m sipping on a lukewarm Coca-Cola, whose cloying sweetness surely dulls my palette, but nonetheless takes out the hint of bitterness in the cigar. Cocoa is okay on its own, but you don’t get chocolate until you add a little sugar.

I was still sitting on that bench, contemplating my dubious future, when out of the dark, softly at first, but growing closer, came a sweet siren song: the lilting laughter of American girls. They emerged from the darkness and sat down on the bench next to me, two blondes in their early twenties, and two swarthy Frenchmen, all dressed for a night on the town, and passing around a bottle of vodka. They paid me no heed, but I didn’t mind: wherever they were going, I was going, and where they were going there would be people and light and noise and probably buses, or at least taxis. Soon a bus came, and we all embarked. I let them get on first, and when the bus driver asked where to I casually pointed at them and nodded, as if to say “same place as them, we’re all together.”

Again the bus meandered through the darkened streets, this time picking up passengers as it went along; most were young and dressed for dancing. Finally we reached our destination, and all piled off, one happy crowd. With a smirk I glanced around the plaza, recognising it instantly. We were at Disneyland.

I followed my young friends as they stashed their vodka bottle in some bushes and joined the thickening crowd of young people that were all streaming, not toward the main, closed entrance to the park, but to an auxiliary area of shops and restaurants on one side, and a western themed bar within. The place was packed with kids, young, good looking, and largely Americans. I thought I recognised the flummoxed waitress from lunch. It was almost two in the morning, but the party was just getting started, people dancing, hooking up. “This ain’t so bad” I thought to myself, “and the taxis outside aren’t going anywhere. I might as well have a beer.”

The crowd at the bar was five wide and three deep, so I waited politely for a while, slowly making my way to the front. Almost everyone was flashing an ID card or something, some kind of discount card, I presumed. I reached the head of the queue, and stood there for ten minutes while it became plain that I was being ignored, so I began leaning further and further over the bar, waving at the bartender. Eventually he begrudgingly came over. I ordered a Corona, and he banged it down with a lot of contempt, even for a French bartender.

I did a lap and found a nook from which I could watch the girls dance without making too big a spectacle of myself, and was about halfway through the beer when I saw the bouncers coming for me, two burly men who took the drink out of my hand, put an arm around my shoulders and escorted me to the door.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “Disney party. Disney staff only.”
“I’m Disney” I protested. “I.T.”
He smirked at me and stroked his face. “Your beard.”

Defeated, I stole the bottle of vodka from the bushes and headed to the taxi stand. The drivers laughed when I said I wanted to go to Paris, but eventually I found one who would do it. 100€.

The next day I looked it up. All Disney staff must comply with the Disney Look, and facial hair is strictly forbidden.

The cigar ends surprisingly well, without any real bitterness: in a rich little bomb like this you expect a certain bitter tar finish, but no, this one ends very smoothly with a deep, rich, coffee note. As always, I take it till I burn my fingers, and only in the very final puffs do I feel a need to spit. It’s a great cigar right now, and is better than the travel humidor and the Royal Robusto, and in a whole other league to the Petite Corona, and think it will be better still in a few years’ time. Does it edge out the Magnum 48? Yes, I’m inclined to think it does. Nice work, Upmann brothers.

H. Upmann Robustos Edición Limitada 2012 on the Cuban Cigar Website

H. Upmann Magnum 48 Edición Limitada 2009

Posted on January 7, 2015 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, H. Upmann

Eight PM on a Monday night finds me indoors and lounging, deep in a soft leather armchair and the company of stalwart fellows, a high-end rum before me. The room rolls with the viscous smog of sixty or so fine cigars being puffed on heartily. I’m in Baranows Lounge, and these are the final days of Melbourne’s last true cigar bar.

Between my own lips hangs an H. Upmann Magnum 48, Edición Limitada 2009, a smoke that drew considerable praise at the time of its release. The first notes are extremely light, almost indistinct from an inhalation of air not through a flaming faggot of dried leaves. If anything there is a slight grassy taste, mildly sweet. If the current profile continues throughout the cigar it will have to be deemed a flavourless failure, but to my reckoning mildness at this point in a short cigar like this bodes well for the future. The rum I’m pairing is a Diplomatico, the trademark of the house (they’re the local distributor), and it goes very well indeed.

At one time Baranows was the best brick and mortar cigar store in Melbourne: their vast humidor held not only the city’s best range of Cubans, but a large selection of non-Cuban trash to boot. Those days, unfortunately, are long behind it, and they haven’t restocked in several years. When I stopped by a few afternoons ago to check the lay of the land before this soirée, the proprietor, Wal, seemed disinterested, most of all in showing me the humidor. He shook his head slowly when I asked what he had in the way of H. Upmann limiteds.
“Nope, none of those at the moment.”
“How about a nice aged Upmann or something… Sir Winston, maybe, or something discontinued?”
The head shake continued.
“Nope, no Upmann at all at the moment.”
He sighed, and waved me lackadaisically toward the walk-in.
“Take a look around if you like.”
It was my turn to shake my head.
“Sorry mate, I’m only interested in Hupmann.”

In the months leading up to the ban of indoor smoking in Melbourne there was much uproar about what it would do to the hospitality industry, about all the bars that would be driven into bankruptcy, but in reality there was only one real casualty: Baranows. I’m sure that many bars and clubs saw a brief decline in profits as the smokers headed outside and didn’t drink so much, but they all soon fenced in their loading docks and put decking on their rooftops, and with them developed a culture of lazy afternoons spent drinking summer punches in outdoor bars, rather than warm VB tinnies around barbecues in the suburbs. The three other serious cigar stores in Melbourne at the time were Alexander’s in Toorak, which had one or two armchairs for smoking, but did most of their business in the takeaway trade, the LCDH in the Hyatt, that never had a smoking area, and Fidel’s in the casino, which closed almost immediately, but put their stock under the counter in the high roller’s rooms of the casino. Fidel’s, though, was always just a side business of a major corporation, and never anybody’s livelihood, and it doesn’t count. I dated a former clerk from Fidel’s briefly, and the day it closed she was simply transferred to being a cashier in the casino cages.

At the midpoint the cigar is fantastic: the tobacco is still very light, but there is a wonderful, changing undercurrent of flavours in the back of the palette, first leather, then coffee, and then a sweet cocoa that I think will build to chocolate in the final third. The construction is perfect, with a razor sharp burn and pure white ash which remains intact for more than half of the cigar, before inevitably winding up on my pants.

No, the only casualty of the smoking ban was poor Baranows. They’d opened their lounge a couple of years prior to the ban, no doubt at great expense, taking a beautiful old bank on a corner block in a nicer inner suburb. They’d renovated it and done it right: big cane arm chairs and comfortable couches, overhung by slow moving fans. Behind the long mahogany bar stood a world class collection of scotches and exotic rums. A friend of mine fell in love with the place not long after it opened, and spent almost $2000 there in a fortnight, enjoying three cigars a day and working his way through their entire menu of $40-a-glass rum. But then came the ban. At first Baranows respected it, hoping that once the smoke had blown over an exemption would be granted for cigar bars. Eventually they put a shade-cloth around their parking lot and wheeled out a few plastic auditorium chairs, offering it as a very humble sanctuary for the smoker.

Some years in they decided to flout the ban, and smoking moved back to the main room, but this soon ended with a handful of council citations, a large fine, and a threat on their liquor license. From there they became a non-smoking cocktail bar, and then a member’s only smoking lounge, with an initial membership fee somewhere around $200. The fee soon lowered, and was eventually dropped entirely. With every change of local government they had to renegotiate the rules – I think for a time in the middle they may have returned to a late night non-smoking venue that did most of its business serving coffee to the after theatre crowd. I subscribed to their mailing list, but could never follow it.

In the meantime the anti-smoking movement went federal: a health minister whose father had died from emphysema was in office, and she made it her personal mission to stamp out the vile habit wheresoever it lurked. The taxes on tobacco almost doubled in four years, and the plain packaging legislation stripped cigars of their ornate bands and cedar boxes, leaving Baranows’ humidor a sea of non-descript olive grey.

If you are reading this, then Baranows is gone: my smoke takes place about two weeks before its final day of trading, December 31^st, 2014. The scuttlebutt is that old Wal is retiring to Cuba and a salsa dancer girlfriend several decades younger than himself, and leaving the lounge in the charge of his son, who will reopen it as a whiskey bar. Goodbye old friend. You gave it your best shot. Sorry I didn’t visit you more often.

The cigar thickens toward the end, showing me a hint of tar before it puts itself out with three quarters of an inch to go. I blow out through it and relight and am rewarded with dense, rich chocolate (95% cocoa) and deep espresso. The flavours fade on my palette, leaving almost no aftertaste. Some light spice, maybe. Slight grass. It is a fantastic finish to a wonderful cigar.

Much better than an H. Upmann Petite Corona.

H. Upmann Magnum 48 Edición Limitada 2009 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Piramides Edición Limitada 2000

Posted on March 25, 2014 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Partagás

Today’s dusky beauty comes to you from a very rare place indeed: my kitchen. About once a year the old juices begin to boil within me, and I decide that it’s time to cook again my favourite dish: French onion soup. The juices would boil more often, but it is a very fundamental belief of mine that to do French onion properly you need to go long and slow, with low heat and constant stirring. Four hours is the absolute minimum amount of time required. I usually do eight. The first couple of hours, while the onions are browning, those are the hardest, because if one onion burns and sticks to the bottom of the pan it ruins the whole thing. The soup that is bubbling away on my stove at the moment is in around hour three – the broth has just been added – and can now be left more or less unsupervised while the flavours marry. It might not be strictly necessary, but I do like to stir it every fifteen minutes or so. If nothing else it gives me an opportunity to taste the broth and see how it’s coming along. Anyway, as I have a couple of hours with not much to occupy myself before dinner, it seems like a good time to enjoy a Partagás Piramides, Edición Limitada 2000. I wonder which scent will bother my neighbours more, cigar smoke or frying onions?

The cigar begins extremely well, very creamy and nutty, with coffee notes. It’s sweet, spicy, and amazing. This thing has layers. It’s a tiramisu. I was going to drink cheap red wine with this – I have half a bottle left from the soup – but these flavours are far too subtle and far too good to drown out like that. The only appropriate accompaniment for this cigar is a glass of water.

I’d had soupe à l’oignon before, but the first time I really had it done right was in Paris in the early 2000s sometime. It was mid-afternoon and had been raining on and off all day, when, as much to get out of the wet as to fill my stomach, I wandered into a little crêperie on the Île Saint-Louis and ordered the lunch set menu, which began with a bowl of French onion. To say the soup was good could not understate it more: it was life changing. I’ve tried to find the place every time I returned to Paris since, but I’ve never been able to.

The first time I tried to cook it for myself was a few months later, back in Australia. I’d been at a party with a French friend where I’d raved about my new-found love of le soupe only to have him sneer at me derisively: “this food, you know, is for the peasants. Maybe you eat it at night when you are drunk, like kebab, but is not for lunch.” I stumbled home about midnight, drunk on far too much of his homemade pear liquor, and some soup seemed like just the ticket. I didn’t look up a recipe or anything – it’s peasant food, how hard can it be? – and basically just boiled an onion in white wine. Total time from raw vegetables to consumption would have been around thirty minutes. I spent around forty five throwing up.

The burn of this cigar is just appalling. Every time I get up to stir the soup it goes out. Every time I set it down for more than about 30 seconds the wrapper goes out and only the core burns. When I do get the wrapper alight for a little while it burns unevenly. I have to touch it up almost with every puff. I feel like I’m smoking a pipe. I’ve only ever encountered one other cigar that burned as badly as this: the Montecristo Robusto EL 2000. This then, is another of the infamous Habano 2000 fireproof wrappers. All that said, it is delicious. Halfway through it is stronger, a heavier coffee and earth. The cream is mostly gone, but a really first class cigar remains.

In 2009, now living in Shanghai, I used to haunt a steakhouse that was popular with the gourmet set. It was housed in an old mansion in the French Concession, and featured a lavish cigar lounge and a well-stocked wine cellar in addition to their restaurant. Their pride and joy was the steaks, and particularly the one at the top of the menu, a bone in rib eye of genuine prime US beef, that the owner would smuggle in in his suitcase personally on monthly meat runs. The trademark side dish was mac and cheese with shaved truffles that cost about the same as a week of lunches at my work cafeteria, but my special favourite was the onion soup gratinée, a variation served with a flaky pie crust rather than the usual croutons – I love a nice soggy, onion soaked baguette, but a buttery mess of onion and pastry has lot to offer as well. A gratinée followed by a nice little filet mignon, a few glasses of wine, perhaps an aged port and a cigar to round things off? It was a very civilized way to spend and evening, and worth any price in a savage place like Shanghai.

The end of the cigar is strong and dirty, but never bitter; fresh mud, straw, and rawhide leather, a barnyard in the rain. I never knew the old Partagás and its earthy charm, before the blend change in the mid-90s, but those who ought to know opine that this is reminiscent of it. To me it’s consistent with the anniversary cigars, and, were it not for the fireproof wrapper, it would be on par with them. On flavour alone it’s as good as anything out there. Of course, it’s almost impossible to smoke, which has to subtract a few points. I’d definitely take one of these over a PSD4, but I’m not sure that I could deal with a whole box.

The soup is ready.

Partagás Piramides, Edición Limitada 2000 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Serie D Especial Edición Limitada 2010

Posted on January 21, 2014 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Partagás

Macau, city of dreams. Well, The Venetian, actually. City of Dreams is across the road.

The world has turned and left me with a free afternoon to wander around Macau, and for the first time in life I’ve taken the trip across the bay to see the Cotai Strip, a broad avenue that is supposed to be the oriental version of Las Vegas Boulevard. I’ve brought a fellow traveller on this journey: a Partagás Serie D Especial, Edición Limitada 2010. In my article on the PSD4 I explained at length the significance of the letters and numbers in the Partagás serie cigars: well, this stick is as good an example of today’s Habanos S.A. disrespecting their own ancient traditions as anything. It has the ring gauge of a Serie D, and a length that falls somewhere between a No. 2 and a No. 3. By rights it should be a Serie D. No. 2.4. I suppose Especial is punchier.

Smoking is allowed on the gaming floors in Macau, so ideally I would be bringing this dusky beauty to you from behind a few feet of green felt, tasting notes coloured by the dizzying highs and terrifying lows that come in a couple of hours of baccarat. Unfortunately though, while they’re fine with smoking, the powers that be tend to take a dim view of note taking and a dimmer one of photograph taking, and such is my dedication to internet journalism that I have exiled myself to the forecourts outside the casinos, the strip itself, and its more or less abandoned footpaths.

There’s really not a lot to this Cotai Strip: just four mega casinos (The Venetian, The Sands, The Plaza, and the City of Dreams across the way), and a lot of huge construction sites. At the very tip is an old school Stalinist gothic concrete archway, a remnant of days gone by. In the distance is the Galaxy, the first of the big casinos on this side of the bay, but it’s not on the strip per-se. When I first came to this place in 2001 it was more or less a Portuguese fishing village, but it sure isn’t one any more. Long gone are the days when a cockfight was the best action in Macau on a Friday night.

I light up outside The Venetian, looking over the canals. St. Mark’s Square is indoors, near the McDonalds. I passed it earlier. The cigar begins excellently, with a good nose of cream, and a fruity tang on the back of the tongue that reminds me of dragon fruit.

I had a spinster great aunt when I was a boy, my grandmother’s sister, a stoic Christian solider who never married and never moved out of her parent’s house. A child of the depression she didn’t mind a little hardship, showering every day with cold water in an outhouse, and believed that her place on this earth was to serve her fellow man. She delivered meals on wheels nightly well into her eighties (by which time many of the meals’ recipients were a decade or two her junior). She passed away when I was about nineteen, and when she did she left behind the fruits of a lifetime of tireless labour and frugal living: an estate of several million dollars. Having no children of her own, and her siblings having preceded her in death, the estate was divided amongst her nieces and nephews, and as one of the fifteen or so members of the third generation, my father gave me a little taste.

One thousand dollars. It was my first experience with inherited wealth. At nineteen I was a university student and living with my parents. I worked in a bookstore a couple of days a month and fixed the odd computer here and there, my total lifetime earnings and net worth was probably somewhat less than five thousand dollars. That four figured cheque represented a lot to me. It represented an opportunity, and I had a plan.

My friend Niles and I had figured it out together one afternoon about six months prior: a new Blackjack strategy, one so flawless that we could hardly believe that nobody had thought of it before. The odds of winning at Blackjack fall pretty close to 50%, with a slight advantage to the house only because if you bust yourself they don’t have to play out the hand. With odds like that, we reasoned, why not simply double your bet each time? Sure, it won’t take long for the amount of money you have on the table to escalate out of hand, but the odds are so narrow surely it’s almost impossible to lose more than a few times in a row. You start at say $1, and when you lose you bet $2, then $4, $8, $16, until you win. Your $16 income offsets the cost of all the lost bets, and nets you the amount of the original wager as profit. It was so simple, so mathematically perfect. We went so far as to go to the casino and investigate where we discovered about minimum bets and table limits, and were foiled for just a minute before I refined the plan for online casinos. The bets need to be sequential, but nothing says they need to take place on the same table. With online casinos you can play on many tables simultaneously – heck, you can play in many casinos simultaneously, and you can sit there staring at a perfect strategy guide while you do it. It might even help a bit in preventing anyone from figuring out our genius plan. All we needed to put it into action was a little seed money… not much… just $1000 or so.

I’m smoking this cigar way too fast, and the mild tropical breeze isn’t helping it. It’s doing pretty well nonetheless: very light and creamy throughout, with some cedar notes, a trace of walnuts, and a little espresso on the back.

The first online casino I chose had an optional practice mode, and I ran that for a while. It worked. A few hours went by and I had made more than a thousand fake dollars. My plan was fool proof. It was working so well, in fact, that I decided a $1 starting wager (and therefore $1 per run profit) was for chumps, and after a few calculations on the back of an envelope set my starting wager at $7, which would allow seven consecutive losses in my $1000. Who loses blackjack seven times in a row? It’s just not possible. I made a deposit and began to play for real.

I played for a few hours every night for about a week. Even though there was literally nothing to my game – for each bet I was following my system, for each action I was following a strategy guide – this was still one of the most exciting things I had ever done. Every now and again I’d have a little run of losses and the bets would get up to $450 sort of territory, and I’d have to leave the room for a few minutes and collect myself before playing it out.

I had more than doubled my money, peaking at around $2200, when the inevitable happened: I lost seven bets in a row. I needed to wager $896 on a single hand, but it turns out that even online casinos have table limits, and without jumping through a few hoops to get a VIP membership, mine was $500. I put down two $448 wagers simultaneously and watched the dealer hit blackjack. With more than $1700 sunk into this run, and less than $500 left to play with, I was done. I agonised about it for a few days before going back in, restarting my system from $7. In the back of my mind I promised myself I’d play out the run I’d lost as soon as I had made back the money, place a single $1700 bet and get it all back. Gamblers are idiots, though, and pretty soon my system fell apart. It seemed like such a chump move to go back to $7 bets right after winning a $200 one, and before long I was betting whatever I felt like on any given hand, following runs, chasing dreams, and within a week I had lost it all.

A few weeks later I did the Google search I should have done on day one: “gambling systems.” Not far down the page I discovered the Martingale System, the well-known gambler’s fallacy that I had conceived and implemented. From the long winded explanation of chance and exponential mathematics I took just a few concepts: long runs of losses are far more likely in reality than intuition would have you believe, and a catastrophic loss will always eventually swallow the early winnings.

I take the cigar into the last inch as the sun sets over the Galaxy Casino. In the bitter tar of the last few puffs I’m sure I taste a little breadfruit. I turf the nub into some nearby bushes. Well folks, that’s it. A fine smoke. Better than a PSD4.

I’m off to hit the tables.

Partagás Serie D Especial Edición Limitada 2010 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Serie D No. 2 Edición Limitada 2003

Posted on January 14, 2014 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Partagás

We open on the waterfront in Kyoto, Japan. Dark. Wet. Beneath the substantial canopy of a twenty four spoke umbrella a man, young, but with a face lined and leathered from decades of abuse, struggles to light a Partagás Serie D No. 2, Edición Limitada 2003.

Apologies in advance for the picture quality on this one folks – low light conditions, street photography, and the constant threat of attack by sewer rat are very much in effect. You may even be subjected to the greatest cigar blog photograph offence: a high resolution picture of my gnarled hands, hangnails and all.

The cigar does not begin well, with sulphur on the front palette, although the aftertaste does have a slight dirty honeydew that may become a thing. I’m willing to cut this one a fair bit of slack – it was sitting on a rock for several minutes in a light drizzle while I took about twenty test photographs trying figure out what settings looked best in the moonlight, and then lit one spark at a time by a lighter that refused to offer the barest wind resistance; it has a right to be a bit temperamental.

I’m pairing this with a randomly selected Japanese convenience store drink, name unknown (which is to say, “name written in characters”). The can boasts that “[they] introduce a new way to enjoy sake with this product.” It’s a mild, sweet nihonshu. Not bad at all.

For the uninitiated, sake is the general Japanese term for alcohol, and technically covers everything from beer to wine to highballs, although more usually it refers to shōchū and nihonshu, the two main genres of Japanese fermented rice drink. Nihonshu is what we in the west know as sake. Shōchū is a rougher, meaner, more vodka-ish sort of beverage, that’s usually drunk mixed with lemonade or similar. The drink that I am drinking as I write this is nihonshu, and as mild and refined a fermented rice drink as one can buy in a can from 7-11. Nihonshu has a bit of an image problem in Japan, namely that only old men really drink it. I suppose that’s why they’re presenting us with a new way to enjoy it: for the kids.

The cigar has mellowed out nicely, with flavours of wood, hay, wet earth, and perhaps a hint somewhere of large horses. Clydesdales. I was last in Japan in 2010, when raw beef liver was a popular delicacy. In 2011 it was banned after a few cases of e-coli poisoning. It has largely been replaced with raw horse liver. True fact.

My shoes soaked after a kilometre or so of leaping from stone to stone over the little creeks that flow into the river from storm water outlets and other gutters, I leave the riverbank and head up to the street that runs parallel to it, one of Kyoto’s traditional nightlife strips, filled with little bars and seedy alleys. I’m starting at the quiet end, where there are still a few residential buildings, pedestrians are scarce, and what bars there are hide themselves behind calligraphy signs and wooden panels. Further along the strip I will find bars for tourists and teenage party animals, but these are not them; these are geisha bars, for the bosses with the money and the inclination to fulfil the ultimate Japanese masculine fantasy: one night as a samurai.

Entering a more heavily trafficked part of the strip, I detect that something is up: there are pedestrians here, and unusually for Japan none of them seem to be smoking, and even more unusually, there are seats and full ashtrays outside the convenience stores. It’s not until I pass a little glassed in smoking area that I realise with a start that what I am doing is entirely illegal. Japan is a country where, by in large, you can smoke anywhere you want: bars, restaurants, hotel rooms, and hospitals all allow smoking inside to some degree. The only place you can’t smoke is on the streets. Generally this is limited to busy streets during rush hour, although in this instance it appears to cover the entire central tourist district of Kyoto. The fine for violators, admittedly, works out to around ten Australian dollars, but I don’t have my passport on me and it seems like it would be a hassle to rumble with the jacks, so I retreat into the smoking area.

I was there when the no-smoking-on-the-street laws were introduced in Osaka, and I remember the public awareness campaign that preceded them. In Australia we have endured three decades of increasingly escalating anti-smoking legislation, always justified in the name of the public health, to mitigate the burden that the phlegmatic death throes of smokers place on our medical infrastructure. In Japan their smoking bans were introduced for the good of Prada jackets. The flyers showed a cartoon of a man being shocked to find a small hole in his overcoat: “don’t smoke in a crowd” the caption said “coats are expensive.” Cigarettes here are four dollars a pack. There was outcry a couple of years ago when they raised the price from three.

Two inches remain, and the cigar is growing bitter. Readers will be surprised to learn that a public smoking area in the rain (the bins are sheltered, the smokers are not) is not conducive to the slow, meditative enjoyment of a double corona. I wish I could find a Japanese flavour for you in here: edamame, miso, something with umami, but no, everything in this cigar is of the earth: dirt, wood smoke, and wildfire.

While smoking may be marginally restricted, public drinking in Japan remains fully unregulated and a matter of national pride, a fact that one of my fellow hedonists is celebrating vigorously, heading to the Family Mart across the way for a fresh beer in between each cigarette. By my count he’s on his fourth in less than half an hour.

The cigar has reached the bitter nub, where only tar remains. The smoke is drifting up into the canopy of my umbrella, where it pools and gets in my hair. Taking inspiration from my cohort, and with the nihonshu can long exhausted, I think it might be time I visited the Family Mart and find myself a little something to wash the asphalt from my palette. I bin the cigar in the anonymous dirty ashcan so thoughtfully provided by the municipal government – an ashcan that I imagine has seen very few Cohiba Lanceros, very few Cuban Davidoffs, and probably only one Partagás Serie D No. 2.

A good cigar. Better than a PSD4.

Partagás Serie D No. 2 Edición Limitada 2003 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Serie D No. 5 Edición Limitada 2008

Posted on January 7, 2014 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Partagás

I’m seated on a windowsill in Osaka, Japan, a town I lived in for a year half a lifetime ago, and the scene of my greatest conquests and my deepest defeats. It’s raining softly, a symptom of a typhoon that has been lingering uneventfully off the coast for a few days.

My cigar today is a Partagás Serie D No. 5 Edición Limitada 2008, appropriately named at 50×110. It’s very squishy, and might not be in the best condition (it has been in my travel humidor in tropical climes for two weeks now). When I peel the cap a great round pellet comes away with it, leaving an exceptionally deep and well defined divot (forgive me if I’ve gone into this before on A Harem of Dusky Beauties, but a divot caused by a round pellet of tobacco concealed under the cap is a signature move of some high grade rollers, and generally a good sign when it comes to cigar construction).

I’m in town for an old friend’s wedding. Today is the sixth day of the associated bender, and I’m suffering accordingly. It’s around five PM, I’ve been awake for four hours, and my first drink is around two hours away (I’m meeting some friends for what will surely turn out to be a very boozy dinner at seven). I’ve been able to keep down food since about two o’clock, and got my fluid levels back to normal around three, but I need to get a little nicotine and caffeine into my system before my pluck is restored and I’m ready to fall back off the wagon. I’m pairing the cigar with a Suntory Boss canned coffee from the vending machine downstairs. I chose Boss for two reasons: firstly because they had a picture of Tommy Lee Jones promoting it on the machine, and secondly because their advertising copy leaves no room for second places: “Boss is the boss of them all.”

The cigar begins very nicely, smooth, almost a hint of chocolate from the first puff. It unfortunately falls off from there, and by the time I’m a centimetre in it presents the typical earthy cedar PSD flavour with a mildly unpleasant acidity.

It’s a wonderful country for love, Japan. In Australia a 5’6” woman is considered to be a healthy weight at 60kg, but in Japan the same girl would be considered morbidly obese over 45kg. Those nymphets with their almond eyes and smooth rubber skin, the ones who never leave the house without five inch stilettos and an hour of hair and makeup, are unable to see me for the pencil-necked geek that I am. To them, I resemble Tom Cruise or Johnny Depp or whatever western movie star girls are into these days. The Japanese society is one of rules, where people act according to tradition, and everything has its place. The Japanese don’t have the same deep set stigmas about pre-marital sex that we do in the west; in traditional villages they still have an ancient custom known as night crawling, where if a father sees that his daughter has a suitor he approves of he will leave her bedroom window open at night. If a naked man is found in a house after dark it’s considered to be a perfect defence against a charge of burglary: he was only night crawling.

The rules governing relationships are complicated. Most people meet each other through friends, and go out on group dates where one person will be designated king and gets to decide who sits with whom, what food is ordered, what games are played and so on. The rules state that the third date is the sex date: if a girl agrees to go out with you three times, you can guarantee that on the third occasion she’s wearing nice underwear. Of course, the huge advantage to being a gaijin scumbag is that you don’t know the rules. Where Japanese men wrap themselves up in knots of respect and tradition and gifts and signals, western men, who have cut their teeth in a society where confidence and directness is key in romance, can cut through the rules and catch the girls off-guard. It’s a huge advantage.

At the half way point the cigar is very nice, very smooth coffee with some sweetness, and notes of citrus in there. I switch my beverage to Boss ‘Gran Aroma.’ It’s sweeter than the boss gold. Sweeter and smoother and it has a slight aftertaste of sour milk. It is not the boss of them all.

There are clubs specifically for foreigners (or more specifically, for foreign men and the Japanese girls who want to meet them), but I didn’t care too much for those – what is the point of being a foreigner if you go to the one place that’s full of other foreigners? I remember one night I was in a local club, the only white guy in the place. It was a techno show, very loud, with smoke machines and lasers and video screens all over the place. I was dancing on my own with my eyes closed enjoying the viscera; the noise, the smells, and the radiant heat of my fellow beings, when I noticed that I was having a suspiciously large amount of accidental body contact with the supple willow in front of me. I put my hands around her waist and smelt her hair and for half an hour or so we danced close, exploring each other’s bodies to the music. I pulled her into the shadows at the edge of the dance floor and kissed her hard, our bodies grinding rhythmically, a simulacrum of the sexual act to come. I took her by the hand and led her from the club. She came, but after a block or so she stopped asked me something in Japanese, the first words to pass between us. I didn’t understand but showed her my ID card, hoping that she would glean from it that we were going to my house and that it was close. The next words that passed between us occurred when we were sitting on my bed: I started to unbutton her blouse and she stopped me while she furiously typed something into her phone, eventually showing me some English word salad and looking at me quizzically. We communicated as I imagined early explorers did with aboriginal peoples: I pointed at myself and said my name and then pointed at her. She looked at me blankly and we both laughed.

In the morning she cleaned my house a little and put her name into my phone, the only name in there in kanji. I asked a friend once and he told me her name was Takako. She had a friend text me a few times, but it never went anywhere.

The cigar has fallen off a little from its midway peak, but it’s still very acceptable. Coffee predominates, but there is a strong herbal earthiness in there as well, and a little more bushfire than I’d like.

Less than 100m from where I now sit was the end of Audrey (she of Ramón Allones Gigantes fame) and I. We saw each other off and on for a few years after Paris. She worked a job organising conferences, and from time to time I would receive a late night SMS: “meet me at the Grand Hyatt. 10:30. Room 404.” I have never been as physically exhausted as I was after one passion filled day at the Airport Hilton.

She came to spend a week with me in Japan. On the second day I took her to the Tsukiji Fish Market. At the time gaijin were technically excluded from the tuna auctions, but we snuck in and watched men in bloodied aprons auction off man-size oceanic tuna, fresh from the water, for tens of thousands of dollars, their rich flesh destined for Tokyo’s finest restaurants. Afterward we ventured into the Miscellaneous Creatures Hall, a hive of scum and villainy, where myriad sightless beasts, hauled from the darkest depths of the earth’s oceans, spend their last few hours suffering in shallow plastic trays. She looked especially lovely that day, her porcelain skin and light blonde hair perfect in the dim lighting of that cavernous place. As I walked behind her down a narrow aisle I noticed a peasant fishmonger staring at her with a look of such lust, of greater lechery than I have seen on the face of any man before or since. Something in his gaze sowed a seed of jealousy in me, a feeling of inadequacy. The whole rest of the week I mistreated her. I refused to accompany her shopping, or to any but the most convenient of sightseeing expeditions. At the end of our time together I took her to the airport train, and before she walked through the gates she sarcastically said “thank you for a magical week,” our private term for our time in Paris. A few days later I received an email that began “I’ve decided not to see you anymore.”

Our paths have crossed precisely once since then, on a street in Melbourne, years later. She saw me and crossed the road.

The last few centimetres are sulphur and tar, but it’s not unpleasant enough that I don’t relight it when it goes out with a centimetre or so still smokable. The extinguishment does it good; the flavour cleans up, there’s no more tar. I’m already fifteen minutes late for my dinner date, but I gotta take this guy to the limit. Very nice.

Better than a PSD4.

Partagás Serie D No. 5 Edición Limitada 2008 on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Montecristo 520 Edición Limitada 2012

Posted on June 12, 2013 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Montecristo

The Montecristo 520, Edición Limitada 2012: at the time of writing this is the most recently released special edition Montecristo; at the time of writing this is the last remaining true special edition Montecristo that this column has not reviewed. I’ve saved it till last for a reason: I’m preparing a ranking, a definitive ordered list of all the Montecristo cigars, and I wanted to save something till the end that might just cause a last minute upset. This cigar has a lot of competition to stare down: Edición Limitadas with a decade more age on them, the rarest of super exotics, and cigars made without compromise for just this kind of competition, and yet, if anything can upset the field I think it might just be the 520. Not many cigars have had the kind of rave reviews that the 520 has had.

It’s a sunny winter’s afternoon, 13 degrees in the shade, and I’m out in my backyard. I’m joined via satellite by an old smoking buddy, one of my first journeyman companions in the world of Cuban cigars. He has washed up as a clerk in a cigar store in Canada, and today he will be smoking a Montecristo 520 alongside mine; a herf just like old times, despite one third of the earth’s circumference being between us.

I light the 520 with a match (I ran out of liquid butane about three months ago, and have gradually exhausted the chambers of all the jet lighters that are scattered about my house. It really is getting to crisis point), fairly unevenly. The early notes have a strong oak flavour, with a little dry spice.

Construction is adequate, if a little on the loose side; the burn evens up nicely after my very irregular light. It does, however, suffer from the 55 ring gauge mouth feel. Aficionados object to the rise of the 55 ring gauge for a lot of reasons: the fatter cigars deliver a much bigger punch, fuller flavoured with more nicotine, which means they trend less elegant, less delicately flavourful; the fat boys are also a break from the ancient traditions that make up the mystique of Cuban cigars; and their rise has been indomitable, with many new fat cigars released at the cost of many thin ones discontinued. It also seems like with fat cigars Cuba is chasing the one market in the world that doesn’t sell their product: the USA. For me though, the main objection I have to the 55 is the mouth feel. I don’t know what it is, the difference between a 55 and a 52 is so small that I can’t see why I’d notice it, and yet I do. Those three extra sixty-fourths of an inch are a bridge too far. They make my jaw ache.

The old Mercedes 600 Grossers in the ‘60s had a three pronged star hood ornament that was twenty per cent larger than the one on the standard car, for no reason other than that the fastidious German engineers felt that the smaller size looked out of proportion atop that gargantuan grill. Typically a fat Cuban cigar will wear the same band as its more svelte brethren – it might be longer to accommodate the gauge, but the detail will be the same size. On this particular Montecristo cigar though, the crest itself is huge – I’d say about twenty per cent bigger. Perhaps they felt it was out of proportion atop this gargantuan ring gauge. It’s funny, because Cuban engineers are usually anything but fastidious.

Memories linked to smell and taste are the most powerful, and when a tang forms in the cigar one hits me like a truck. I was about eight years old, traveling with my parents. We had spent a few days staying with some friends in Singapore, and they’d given us a gift of a bag of lollies, presumably to keep my sister and I quiet on the flight. They were lemon sugar drop things, but coated in a white powder that gave the lolly an intensely sour taste for a few moments, before the sweet of the sugar relieved it. The powder was dusted on the sweets, and so a good deal of it collected in the bottom of the bag, such that when my father opened it, particles of the powder would become airborne, giving off a distinct, chemical lemon tang. That is the flavour I taste now in the Montecristo 520.

On the other side of the world my colleague tastes chocolate. I am all around it, but not there. There is cocoa, sure, and coffee, and some other beans, but it lacks the sweetness needed for me to call this chocolate. There is a bitterness one might confuse for a very pure chocolate, but to me it’s coffee, the bitter end of a Turkish cup.

As I burn into the final third the flavour of cream is present. The cigar is so mellow that I can barely taste the tobacco. Tar pokes through from time to time for the penultimate inch (quite reasonable for the business end of a large cigar like this), but as the coal crosses into the final one the tar dissipates entirely. It is simply sweet and creamy, with a hint of spice.

The final notes are of a well-used leather wallet. I smoke it all the way to the end. People sometimes ask me what the secret is to smoking a cigar all the way. “How do you not burn your fingers?” they say. “You don’t” I tell them. “The secret is not to care.”

So here’s the straight dope: the Montecristo 520 is a great cigar. You can still buy boxes if you’re prepared to look around for ten minutes, and you definitely should.

I can say with every confidence that in 2013, with less than a year of age on it, this cigar is better than the 2000 Robusto EL with thirteen. It’s also better also than the C, the D, the 2006 Robusto, and even the 2001 Double Corona and the 2008 Sublimes (although, interestingly, of these the Sublimes comes the closest).

There is, however, one Montecristo EL that the 520 is not better than: it’s immediate predecessor, the 2010 Grand Edmundo.

Why, I wonder, in 2013 are the three most recent Montecristo Edición Limitadas the three best Montecristo Edición Limitadas? Have the older ones peaked, and are on their way out? Do ELs not age well? My major complaint about all the old ELs was of an overriding bitterness, which is not usually a symptom of a cigar that is past its prime (usually quite the opposite in fact). Perhaps it’s just that the new ELs have been made to peak as they’re sold, and will fall off dreadfully in the near future.

Or perhaps those Cuban tobacco engineers have become a little fastidious in the last few years. Perhaps their hard work has paid off, and the cigars are simply reflecting that. Perhaps the Montecristo 520 is progress.

Montecristo 520 Edición Limitada 2012 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Montecristo Double Corona Edición Limitada 2001

Posted on May 10, 2013 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Montecristo

It’s a slightly overcast Saturday, and, wandering down a local bike path that runs between the freeway sound wall and an urban drainage canal, I find myself in a pleasant little glade of pine trees, not so unlike the fens and spinneys of my youth. The central feature of the glade is a fallen tree – so perfect a seat that one suspects it was felled specifically for the purpose. Either way, it’s just the place to sit, to watch the cyclists, to enjoy a sly beer, and to smoke a Montecristo Double Corona, Edición Limitada 2001.

It’s a lovely looking thing this double corona, with the classic dark EL wrapper. This came out in only the second year of the EL program, and the Cubans still hadn’t quite decided what they were doing yet: there were five cigars that year, and this isn’t even the big one! Unlike the previous year, there is a number on this band, although it’s not embossed. Like most aficionados I lament the changes the last decade has brought to the Cuban cigar industry; whenever there is a band change like the one Montecristo will undergo this year (they’re making the fleur-de-lys gold) my voice is among the many saying “no, don’t tamper with a classic, Cuba lives and dies on its heritage,” but I will concede that these faded, thin, non-embossed, badly printed bands do feel very insubstantial when compared to their modern equivalents. Of course, that’s entirely the charm, the idea that your luxury cigars are a product of a shambolic command economy, but I will concede that the packaging of modern Cubans is better, if less charming.

I slice the cap and light it. The double corona has a real Cuban draw, tight and cool, and presents a wonderful elegance from the start, with a strong note of cedar and the slightest hint of coffee. Its age is very evident in the mildness of the tobacco throughout the first inch or so.

There was a period when I was a teenager and this drainage canal was equidistant from my house and the houses of three of my closest friends, and as it had the additional advantage of being dark and fairly private, we used to come down here from time to time to drink beers and get high. I have memories of cruising police officers occasionally shining their torches on us in the night, shouting across the water, demanding to know what we were doing and telling us to move along, although as the road only runs along one side, and that side was invariably not the side we were on, and the bridges are few and far between, their threats were largely impotent. I used to use the canal as a thoroughfare, too, when traveling home from my friend’s houses, and in that I encountered the same problem as the police: a lack of bridges. The width of the waterway at its narrowest point fluctuates between one and three meters across (dependent on how recently it has rained). When at its nadir the distance represented no challenge to a champion hurdler like me, and when at its zenith I knew not to test it, and would make the lengthy detour to the footbridge. It was when it was in about the middle, one and a half to two meters, that I got myself into trouble. The problem was not so much the distance – I was pretty good at gauging the length of my own leap – but that if the water was falling rather than rising it would have left a slippery sheen of invisible slime on the concrete of either bank, something I invariably failed to anticipate (remember I was usually undertaking this trek while at least mildly [and often heavily] inebriated). More than once I went to leap only to find my footing disappear from under me, and more than once I found myself waist deep in that foetid, slimy water. I’d have to hose myself off in the garden before going in the house. I ruined more than one pair of shoes.

After the halfway point the cigar shows some bitterness and a hint of the dark chocolate and coffee found in the C and D, although this cigar is much more refine and pleasant than either of those. The tobacco is thickening a little but is still very light. The ash is a lovely white, and, had I left it unmolested, I think it probably would have held for the entire length of the thing (although I value my pants too much to try).

My friends and I never used to come down as far as this glade, and I can’t imagine the rozzers doing it now, but nonetheless, discretion is the better part of valour and I’m keeping my beers concealed behind the log. They’re two beers from the Japanese Hitachino brewery, one a heavy and bitter espresso stout, the other a ginger infused ale. Neither is particularly good (or tastes particularly strongly of either ginger or espresso), but they both exhibit a similar sort of vaguely bitter, vaguely coffee, mild sort of taste that complements, or at least matches the Double Corona. A cyclist inspects me on my log with my beer and cigar and comments “very nice” as he zooms by.

As always, when six inches of tar have accumulated in the final one, the cigar becomes very bitter, real heavy 95% cocoa chocolate stuff; unpleasant, but in an enjoyable kind of way. The burn has been impeccable the entire length, requiring nary a touch up nor a relight.

The interesting thing to me about the Double Corona is how similar its flavour pallet is to the C and D, and how distinct those are from the Robustos and the later ELs. I’ve seen this cigar brought up as an example of how the early ELs are not aging well, but it’s not that; what it is evidence of is that the early ELs need a lot of age. The C and D are both mediocre at the moment, but I think with another few years they could be as good as this cigar, and with a few years to iron out its kinks, this cigar could be something amazing.

At present it’s better than a Monte 4, and a good deal of the rest of the field.

Montecristo Double Corona Edición Limitada 2001 on the Cuban Cigar Website