vaperfavour":sp733mxm said:
hey there greg, I managed to get a tin of bohemian scandal and I have to say its great! I have been smoking it in an antique calabash. like they were made for each other. is blue mountain latakia cyprian or syrian? this 759 is just too good! do you have a blend that recreates it?
There's nothing that I would claim, at this point, as truly recreating the original 759, but I do have a couple blends that were inspired by it.
When I was developing the Classic Collection, I was visiting a friend's shop. He opened an ancient tin of 759, and I was seriously smitten. I'd smoked quite a few tins of that wondrous weed in the past, but never a tin that old. When I stuck my nose in it, I was treated to an amazing aroma. The VAs had fermented beautifully, and presented an almost perique-like character, though no perique was present in the original blend.
When I went home that night, I started working on what was to become Blackpoint. It captured my impressions of that tin quite well, and has become one of my personal faves.
Abingdon, on the other hand, was more an attempt to capture some of the truer essence of later examples of the 759 that I sampled. I don't know which one will, over time, deliver a closer approximation to the original, but they're both really nice blends, and satisfy my own cravings when I want something reminiscent of those beautiful black and gold tins.
It's a real challenge to attempt to recreate old blends. I can take them apart, gain some understanding of their components and their character, but there's no way to subtract the effects of time in order to know just how close I've gotten.
I just went through another vertical tasting of Dunhill London Mixture, and included some aged Westminster. I'll have to write something up about the experience, but am happy to report that I think Westminster will, given a few more years, show itself very much like the oldest example of LM I have, which was what I was aiming at when I shot that particular arrow.
-glp