Partagás Salomones La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2008

Posted on February 18, 2014 by atgroom under La Casa del Habano Exclusivo, Partagás

A hot-tub in Taipei, Taiwan. Lance Hendricks, a friend blessed with the intelligence to dream of an exceptional life for himself, but crippled, both metaphorically (by a pathological fear of an honest day’s work) and literally (by a genetic pre-disposition to hip injury), has dropped out of society and washed up here. My own life in China was always that of the Western imperialist; earning an Australian salary that was a factor of ten greater than that of my equally ranked local colleagues, I lived the high life: the best clubs, the best drugs, the prettiest girls – all of them were the exclusive domain of me and my deviant expatriate friends. My man in Taiwan is the first white person I have known to live the life of a typical Chinese native, not in the glamorous heart of Taipei where glass sheathed towers flank wide boulevards and girls with short skirts and debatably genuine Prada handbags dance with the wàiguórén and sip Johnny Walker Blue Label mixed with sweet green tea, but in Tucheng, a rat’s nest of blind alleys and rabid dogs two stations from the end of the line. Being a cripple, his one requirement of my visit was that I find a hotel not too far from his burrow and the only place I could book online was a suites only motel near the freeway, the kind of place frequented by the discreet elite: those with the money and the inclination to take their girlfriends somewhere they won’t be recognised. Let me put it this way: the main drive is decorated by a forty meter frieze of nude sirens bathing. I am fairly sure my visit marks three milestones for this establishment: the first foreign visitor, the first solo guest, and the first person to stay more than one consecutive night. The room is as luxurious as any I have encountered in my travels. The floor space runs about 90m², of which the bathroom constitutes at least 40m², containing a fountain, a wet massage bed, a six headed shower, the usual sink and toilet along with a spa bath that could comfortably accommodate eight. It is in this bath that I find myself tonight. It is next to this bath that my Partagás Salomones finds itself tonight.

I dip the cigar in the clean bathwater before I respectively light and enter it. It doesn’t seem to do it any harm. At first the draw is a bit tight, as is typical of perfectos, but within ten or so minutes it opens up. The flavour is a mild, milky earth and light tobacco. Delicious. Dear Reader, I would like to submit that from the inside of a spa bath is the ideal condition to enjoy a cigar. With good friends and strong drink is undoubtedly delightful, but one tends to lose focus on the intricacies of flavour in that situation. A spa, however, is fun in and of itself, and it’s relaxing, focusing the mind and the senses. An added advantage is that the heat will hopefully leech from my body whatever toxins the tobacco might deposit. I’m pairing this cigar with a Gold Medal Taiwan Beer, which I bought because I was in Taiwan, and it seemed sensible to drink the national beverage. I can’t imagine on what criteria this alleged gold medal was awarded, as Gold Medal Taiwan Beer is as tasteless a brew as I have ever encountered, being essentially mineral water with a hint of malt extract. It does the job, nonetheless.

Lance was once a promising boy with a bright future, raised by a good family in a pleasant middle class area, he attended one of Melbourne’s best public schools. In his late teens he met a nice girl, Natalie, and after a few years of tertiary education he got a decent office job in a technical field. He and Nat moved into a comfortable suburban home together, they purchased cats, and to all eyes their future was laid out: a few kids, a lengthy mortgage, and the occasional international holiday, followed by the comfortable twilight of the working middle class.

His decline started, as near as I can pinpoint it, about five years ago. I hadn’t seen him in a month or so when we ran into each other at a mutual friend’s art exhibition, and so, catching up, I asked how Natalie was. “Oh, she’s gone” was the response, surprisingly flippant for the announcement of the end of a seven year relationship. “I’ve got a new girl now. She’s over there.” The girl he pointed to was an unerringly beautiful seventeen year-old, doll faced Russian brunette wearing a short red cape. He leaned in and whispered “her name’s Natasha. She cost me twenty-five thousand dollars.” I’ve never been sure if he was joking.

From then on announcements came thick and fast. A few weeks later he got a new job. A month after that he bought a flat and one of the cats died. The next month he’d quit the new job and was collecting the unemployment benefit. When I first visited him in his new home where there wasn’t a lot of conventional furniture, just broken guitars he’d found at a hard rubbish collection. For reasons not entirely clear to me he’d demolished most of the bathroom, leaving exposed pipes and concrete. We smoked weed out of a bong he’d made from a large juice bottle and some rubber tube. He was very proud of it. We watched metal videos and he played the solos from Megadeath songs for me.

About halfway through the Salomones a lump of ash falls into the water, where the jets instantly pulverize it. The flavour is very balanced, mid-tobacco with a sweaty, earthy note and slight peppery aftertaste, like a very light chemical capsaicin. It’s something akin the smell of freshly maced protesters.

Natasha lasted a year or so, and when she was gone he sold the flat (for a reasonable profit – he had someone come and finish the bathroom) and moved to Thailand to live in a kickboxing training camp. He returned to Australia three months later, lean and strong, with long hair and a beard. He moved back into the pleasant, middle class house in which he was raised and got a job driving a truck. It wasn’t a lot of work, a few hours a day at best, which left him with a lot of hours to get in his mother’s hair. He needed a retreat, and so strung up a heavy bag in the garden shed and would spend hours every day kicking it.

His family had always had weak hips. His father, only in his sixties, had had both replaced, as had his uncle and their father before them, but when Lance’s hip started to hurt him he was unconcerned. “It’s just the muscle growing” he told me. “Strength builds when the fibres in the muscle tear, and then grow back stronger. If I want to be strong I have to fight through the pain, keep kicking this bag.” After a month or so his body rebelled. He could no longer lift his leg high enough to kick the bag.

Even at his most lucid Lance always had a furtiveness about him, a hint of madness in his eyes that was considerably exacerbated by his permanently dilated pupils, a symptom of the weed with which he increasingly self-medicated his injury. In agonising pain and barely able to walk, with long hair, a beard, and dressed in ill-fitting athletic clothes from K-Mart, he went into a doctor’s office and was treated with suspicion; “It’s all psychological” they told him, refusing to prescribe anything stronger than Ibuprofen. “Go home and get some rest.” He tried a few different doctors with similar results, and grew increasingly frustrated by what he perceived as the uncaring system. Then one day he announced that he’d met a Japanese girl on the internet and was going to live in the suburbs of Tokyo with her for six months to convalesce.

Into the final quarter, and the cigar remains largely unchanged. A slight creamy dairy note has emerged. Even more static is the flavour of the Taiwan beer, which remains as bland as ever.

Lance returned to Australia with his condition considerably worsened, now unable to walk without the aid of a cane and reluctant to drive. His once muscular physique was gone, and although he had no appetite, he was growing fat from inactivity. Most of his old friends had abandoned him, and he had acquired a new set, all much younger than him, but sharing the same circumstance: they were unemployed drug addicts living with their parents. Lance and I had always liked to go out for Indian food together, but now he was reluctant. He couldn’t eat without first stopping to smoke a jazz cigarette in a laneway, something I was loath to let him do. We fought over it, and drifted apart for a while.

When we reconciled he had found a new girlfriend, a twenty year old Taiwanese international student named Storm. A semi-professional basketball player in her native land, in Melbourne she played power forward for a bush league Tuesday night game, and Lance and I would go watch her play sometimes. I never saw her lose. She moved in with him, sharing his childhood bedroom. Once a Spartan cell, he covered the walls with egg cartons and miscellaneous fabric in order to make a better studio for recording self-composed rap songs to put on Youtube. Within six months Storm’s visa ran out, and within seven he had moved to Taiwan to be with her.

And so I find myself in a spa bath in Tucheng. Two days ago I met my friend by the fountain in front of the Taipei Main Railway Station. His eyes have turned milky, and he’s put on a lot of weight (he lives mainly on fried chicken and Red Horse beer – his preference due to its 8% alcohol content). I haven’t spoken Chinese in three years, and even then my vocabulary never went beyond thirty words, and yet, whenever Lance and I are in a store or restaurant and someone speaks to us in Chinese he looks to me to translate. I think he finds the language offensive and refuses to learn it on general principal.

Earlier today I visited him at his home. He showed me the supermarket where he buys his groceries. We bought some beer and drank it in a park. On his recommendation I bought a bag of beetle nut. It’s disgusting, but it makes you feel pretty jazzed. A little toasted we wandered into a junk shop and purchased an arsenal of air rifles (banned in Australia), and tried firing them out the window of his apartment. The little yellow pellets were too hard to see, so we came back to my giant bathroom and blazed into the fountain and the marble walls, the pellets shattering and sending tiny plastic shrapnel everywhere. By dinner time he was tired from the walking and returned home, leaving me with an evening to myself and Partagás Salomones.

What will become of my friend I cannot say; like all fugue states, his must eventually reach some kind of conclusion: perhaps death, perhaps epiphany. I look forward to finding out.

In the last moments the Salomones becomes harsh, but not without due cause. This was not a small cigar. The final notes are bitter tar and earth wood smoke. An excellent cigar, considerably better than a PSD4.

Partagás Salomones on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Serie C No. 1 Colección Habanos 2002

Posted on February 4, 2014 by atgroom under Colección Habanos, Partagás

Saturday morning at the yacht club and the sun is shining. The upper deck restaurant is busy with middle aged foursomes eating oysters, and at the jetty out front a small skiff comes and goes, ferrying eager seamen to the larger boats moored a little ways offshore. On the beach a clutch of small children run and scream, the older children’s game of beach cricket intersected and interrupted but the younger children’s tag. The clutch of tables on the grassy lawn between the clubhouse and the beach, however, are empty save for a few bags, and so it’s at one of these that I settle myself and begin to pick at the cap of a Partagás Serie C No. 1, Colección Habanos 2002. I’m not a member of this club, but I am wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Clubmaster sunglasses, so I doubt I’ll be questioned.

I have high hopes for this cigar. Regular readers may recall that the Montecristo Maravillas No.1, the 2005 entry in the Colección Habanos series, topped the leader board in my final summation of all the exotic Monties in the last season of A Harem of Dusky Beauties. Will the Serie C No. 1 (which at 48 x 170, is sized the same as its historical counterpart) be able to do the same thing for Partagás?

I set it ablaze and see, accompanying it with a cappuccino purchased from a pair of surly teens manning the galley bar. The cigar’s draw is a little on the loose side, not a Cuban draw. The first puff is bitter, over hot from the lighter, but on the second it mellows, and a nice tannic spice over mild, first rate tobacco spreads over my palette. There is a sort of sharp aftertaste that I can’t put my finger on. The wrapper is a bit dry and has been manhandled at some point (it made the journey over here loose in my breast pocket), and is peeling a little. Nothing I can’t deal with.

My uncle was a member of this club when I was a boy, and he kept a little boat named the Sophie-Lou moored off this very jetty. He took me out on it precisely once, when I was about eleven. Readers may be surprised to learn that I was a sulky, contrarian sort of boy, and not much for sports or the outdoors, and wasn’t impressed by my uncle’s proposal of a day out on the water. I think I mainly went because my cousin had told me that they saw a seal when they went out a few days earlier. My father and another uncle came with us, and we cruised out into the bay, where no seals were in evidence. I quickly lost interest and started reading my book. Eventually we stopped in what my uncle considered a likely place for fish. He cast my rod for me and then left me monitoring it while he went to drink beer with the others, and I promptly wedged it into something and went back to my book. A few beers later for the others, and a chapter or so later for me, and my uncle declared that the fish weren’t biting here and that we should reel in our lines and move the boat. I hadn’t been reeling in long when I began to sense that perhaps there was something more on the end of this thing than just a hook – the line didn’t fight me exactly, but it dragged like it had snagged some seaweed or something. I pulled and pulled, my uncle’s attention now fully on me, laughing at the idea that this disinterested, surly boy might have caught the only fish of the day. As the line neared the surface it became clear that there was something there, there was a fish, a fish that a large squid as in the process of eating. I had it just beneath the surface, my uncle reaching for the net, when the squid realised what was up, fired his ink jet, and disappeared in the cloud. The weight released the line jerked out of the water, and I reeled it in to inspect my catch: a half-eaten, ink covered fish. We threw it back.

A little beyond the halfway point and the cigar is still going beautifully. Somewhere between mild and mid-strength, a rich spice still dominates. I’ve returned to the galley to purchase Australia’s favourite snack, a Golden Gaytime, a treat of caramel ice-cream, coated in chocolate and honey cookie crumbs. They’re usually a little sickly sweet for my taste, but it accompanies the cigar well, taking the edge off the tobacco.

I spent New Year’s Eve in Monaco one year. My parents had holed up in a little village in Provence someplace, and I’d joined them there for Christmas, but come the 31^st I was going a little stir crazy and I decided I’d better head somewhere a bit more lively for New Year’s Eve, and what better New Year’s town is there than Monaco?

It was everything I hoped it would be: I arrived at four o’clock in the afternoon, and the first thing I saw when I walked out of the tunnel at the station was a man throwing firecrackers out of a Ferrari. I found my hotel (the cheapest hotel in Monaco proper, which wasn’t all that cheap), had a quiet dinner alone, and then changed into my tuxedo. I set out about nine, wandering the streets with a Siglo VI between my lips, admiring the traffic jam of three hundred thousand dollar cars. I sat in the park behind the casino for a while and admired the twenty million dollar boats. Monaco is a nice city to visit in any capacity, but it’s really designed as a destination for people with twenty million dollar boats. For a while I watched an impossibly beautiful girl in a sort of sailor’s uniform chase three small children up and down the four decks of a giant boat in the marina, presumably a nanny left to mind the children while the parents went to some party in the town proper. At midnight there was fireworks and dancing in the casino square. I saluted a man who was standing on the casino steps, surveying the scene while puffing on a Romeo Churchill. It was about one AM that I found Roger Moore. I was walking back along the waterfront, and there he was, on the rear deck of a boat named The Miss Moneypenny, drinking cocktails with four beautiful girls who looked young enough to be his daughters but I don’t think were. “Happy new year, James Bond” I yelled to him. He scowled, and called “Happy new year, young man” before going inside. A little further around the bay I ran into a clutch of French girls who were screaming and cackling uproariously at their friend who was throwing up in the gutter. A Monegasque woman appeared in an apartment window and yelled at them in French. They yelled back for a while and then staggered off into the night.

The cigar grows bitter before its time, with almost two inches remaining. There’s an earthy taste beneath the tar, and a slight coffee. The spice is gone. I’m a bit light headed from the nicotine, which is odd as the cigar seemed mild throughout. I nub it nonetheless.

All things considered, this was a great cigar, and better than any Partagás that I’ve smoked this season. That said, as great as it was, it doesn’t come close to the Monte Maravillas. It may be partly down to my personal taste – I’ve always been a much bigger Monte fan than Partagás – but to me the Monte was in a whole different league. Not that this wasn’t great though. It’s certainly better than a PSD4.

Partagás Serie C No. 1, Colección Habanos 2002 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Serie P No. 1

Posted on January 28, 2014 by atgroom under Duty Free and Travel Retail Series, Partagás

Before I begin, a word about jars.

Starting in the 1920s, Cuban cigars have occasionally been released packaged inside ceramic porcelain jars. Lined with a cedar sheet, and with an airtight seal and small humidifying sponge in the lid, these jars make nice little humidors. Aficionados opine that much like in aluminium tubes, the air circulates less inside a sealed jar than it does inside a porous cedar box, which means the oils in the leaf take longer to evaporate. Less oil movement means that the cigars (in theory, at any rate), age slower, and as the legends tell us, slower aging is better ageing.

The Millennium Jars in 1999 marked the return of the special edition porcelain jar to the modern era, and since them a special edition jar of some kind has appeared more or less annually. They’re very popular among collectors, and I can see why, as they are really very nice things. The cigar we consider today is the Partagás Serie P No. 1, which was released (in a jar) exclusively for duty free retail in 2010. The lid on my example sits on very lightly, held in place only by gravity and the slight grip of the rubber membrane that creates the seal. The very best jars from days of yore would have a seal made only by two pieces of perfectly milled porcelain, but our modern mass manufacturing techniques can’t match the old precision, at least not at the price Habanos S.A. is willing to pay.

As I discussed in my article on the Serie D No. 4 (and most every essay since), the letter in a Serie cigar theoretically denotes its gauge, and the number its length. Not so much in the P1: the P presumably stands for piramides, but the 1 should indicate a considerable length, which this does not have: by rights it should probably be a P4. What that means for the series overall though I don’t know: the P2 conforms to what you’d expect.

To me the P1 was always a working man’s sort of cigar: a knock about little pyramid of spice and tar for the tradesman on the go, and so I’ve brought this one today to a working man’s sort of venue: the smoking section of a McDonald’s restaurant in Osaka, Japan. I rarely pair cigars with food – I find the cigars tend to drown out the taste – but in this instance I think I may have found a perfect match: the Partagás Serie P No. 1 and a Medium Big Mac Value Meal.

Every McDonald’s in Japan has a smoking section, the size and pleasantness of which vary depending on the size of the restaurant. A larger branch will usually have a whole floor set aside for the smokers, but not so this one, where the smoking area is a small glassed off booth with eight seats. It’s not nearly as ventilated as I’d like. Besides myself there are four occupants, three teenage hoodlums and what appears to be a homeless man (a rare site in Japan), and between us we are adding a considerable pall to the air. There is an air-conditioner, but it seems to be blowing air around more than it is filtering it.

From the first puff the cigar doesn’t mess around, straight into dirt and spice and tarred cedar wood. When you’re only a three and a half inch cigar first impressions count, and the P1 is definitely a rough kid. Sometimes I like them rough.

I’m not sure if it’s by design or by accident – although knowing both Japan and the McDonald’s corporation like I do, I’m going to bet design – but the ashtray they have provided fits perfectly within one half of the Big Mac burger box. The further I get into this meal I begin to think that perhaps the Medium Big Mac Value Meal has undergone a similarly intensive engineering process, with just one design goal in mind: to totally swamp a cigar aficionado’s palette. The salt of the chips, the sweet of the cola, and then the greasy mess that is the Big Mac touches sweet, salt, sour, umami – every taste button bar one: bitter. Fortunately the Partagás Serie P. No. 1 is happy to oblige and complete the sensory overload.

Confines are cramped in the smoking area; seated on a stool at a counter facing the wall I feel that my personal space begins and ends at the borders of my meal tray. My cigar makes its cyclical journey from the ashtray to lips within this zone, and small flecks of ash have dropped from it onto my chips. To my overloaded palette it is lending them a subtly peaty flavour, much like one might find in an Islay single malt. From the cigar has emerged a note of aniseed.

My visits to McDonald’s these days are generally limited only to the occasional particularly desperate morning after the night before, when only the most efficient mechanism for delivering a jolt of sugar and fat and salt and caffeine to my system will suffice, but I’m appreciating it tonight for reasons beyond the gimmick of smoking a cigar in the world’s most iconic family restaurant. The example of a Big Mac that one finds in Japan, a country where even punk teenagers in minimum-wage jobs have a work ethic, is substantially better put together than the Australian variety, but once one takes a bite they are utterly indistinguishable, both from each other, and from their ancestor I consumed twenty five years ago at my best friend’s birthday party, and from the countless others I have eaten all over the world. Consistency is important, and pleasant for its own sake.

Like the Big Mac, the Partagás Serie P No. 1 is a consistent cigar. I’ve smoked a heap of these little guys over the years, and always enjoyed them as no-nonsense firecrackers, an efficient tool for delivering the joy of a great Cuban smoke directly to your pleasure centre. They’re not the most complex things in the world, and I don’t really think they’re worthy of their packaging: these should be an everyday smoke, not a collector’s trophy to age and admire. In my overall ranking of the Partagás specials these will suffer for their length, but inch for inch they’re as good as anything out there. I just wish that they were regular production, because they’re more deserving of it than a PSD4.

Partagás Serie P No. 1 at 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.