All in By Ken Gargett - 2019
We continue the double drinks experiment. This time, I went with two utterly different drinks to see what we’d come up with.
But first, the cigar. A Partagas 8-9-8 of undetermined age, though after smoking it, I think it had a number of years under the belt, but not ancient by any means. The first time I have tried one of these in quite a few years – yes, so many cigars and so little time to smoke them all. Immediate impression is that this is all old school. A nice thin (ish) ring gauge – 43 – and Lonsdale sized. So thumbs up from the kickoff. The flavours are instantly powerful, take-no-prisoners stuff. I think Rob and I did a vid of these some 6-8 years ago. No idea what we thought. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I suspect we enjoyed it…
Been thinking about this matching concept. I have a feeling that when one has a decent cigar and a decent drink, there is a subconscious tendency to think, all is well and that they work. Now, I am more than happy to smoke/drink whatever if I am enjoying them, but I wonder if, as far as combinations go, this is falling into the easy trap. So on occasion, I’m going to try a couple of different drinks to go with a cigar and see if one works better than the other. I think that, in order not to confuse the palate too much, it has to be one after the other rather than back and forth. We’ll see…
For Kenfessions this time, it was a dip into the bag of mixed singles. Was not looking for anything too extreme, too large. Just a pleasant evening smoke. In the end, we exceeded that in spades!
So, a des Dieux was perfect – the Hoyo de Monterrey ‘Le Hoyo des Dieux’. From 2011. I think I have a few older boxes (00, 03, 08? although a little inner voice is saying, no, you’ve smoked the lot – hope not and need to check. An even smaller voice says I had a cabinet of these from ?, in the days of unbanded cigars, but I note that cabs of these were discontinued in 06?? That would be a pleasant find)…
Always been a big fan of the Woodford Reserve Bourbon and never really understood why it does not get more love around the traps. No matter. It is probably my go-to bourbon, partly to do with the fact that it has been readily available here for some time.
I have mentioned in the past, for reasons I do not completely follow, I received a sample bottle of Batch 1, when it was first released (at the time, I was doing very little with spirits). And I will confess that though I’ve enjoyed bottles from a number of batches since then, that was something special – I have a theory that…
Couple of interesting things touched down at the swamp recently. I had been talking to the people behind a rare spirits company and they were going to flick through a sample for review. And Rob left me with a mystery cigar. No clues at all.
The whisky sample turned up and it was, wait for it, a 10ml thimble. I thought how on earth does one get to taste anything from such a minute sample? I found out later that a full 700ml bottle comes in at around £4,000, so suddenly 10mls is looking very generous. And it was such a stand out, no issue at all…
