One tobacconist had all the Dunhills, but after trying 965 I vowed never to try another Dunhill ever. But that’s another story…

When I began the pipe after my 30 year hiatus I had an intense attack of TAD, acquiring tins of all genres from a variety of blenders. It didn’t take long for me to discover that Dunhill’s My Mixture 965 had a practically religious following. I asked my tobacconist about it and he said that a fair proportion of pipers smoke nothing else, that it’s the only blend they know and they won’t even consider anything else.

It was around this time that My Mixture 965 was added to Tobacco Reviews’s Pipe Tobacco Hall of Fame.

Well, that certainly clinched it. 965 jumped to the top of my shortlist for blends I had to try. With so many ardent fans, and now a Hall of Famer, it had to be a winner, right?

In my zeal to try new blends I had somehow forgotten that I am naturally wary of anything that has achieved mainstream success: Barney the Dinosaur, Madonna, American football, religion…

But that’s what happens when puppy love and newfound cravings intersect inside your brain — the object of desire short-circuits directly into the realm of necessity, bypassing common-sense.

I had by this time befriended the five remaining tobacconists in Toronto, from downtown to Yorkville, and I knew which one had it for the best price: a little store called Cheers located on a dilapidated yet trendy backstreet in the university/hospital district. It’s run by a bald, really cranky oriental man and his wife. The store has a little walk-in humidor, cases of pipes and pouches, shelves and shelves of tins, cabinets with pipes and other smoking paraphernalia, and display cases of Buddhist themed tchotckes, all of it crammed in a small newsdealer-type store. He’s got the best selection and prices in Toronto by a long shot, maybe even all of Canada for all I know. He’s got the entire catalogue of Dunhill, McClelland, Peterson, Solani, Samuel Gawith, Davidoff, J. F. Germain, and a few others. It’s become my primary source in Canada for tobacco. Fortunately my pilgrimages to the store are now monthly instead of bi-weekly.

So I made a special trip one day (I’m a fast walker, and can walk the 18 blocks across town from work in about twenty-two minutes) and purchased that classy, mysterious tan tin. 965. By this time the number had a mystique to me. Had they really blended 964 blends before this until they had it right? After experimenting with nearly one thousand blends, was there a “Eureka!” one dark and stormy night, just when they were on the cusp of giving up, demoralized as they were after all those years of money and toil in their pursuit of the perfect blend, until that night, when one took a puff and his irises enlarged, then another took a puff, and soon their eyes widened, finally!, finally!, holding aloft their pipes subtly glowing with a golden halo, tears streaming down their faces in wonder and joy — at last, at last hallelujah! they had finally attained a blend worthy of some godhead…!

I had obviously built up some expectations about this blend. But I’m very good at shedding preconceptions when it gets time to experience or consider something. So when I loaded up the bowl that night — that Chacom Natural Panelled Billiard I had purchased as my first pipe in over thirty years — I was ready to try a new blend, one that I had been looking forward to trying for a while.

Well, I certainly didn’t expect it to be bad. Mediocre and overrated, maybe, at worst, but not bad. But no, it was bad, really really bad, and I knew it at once. And once I decided it was bad, I certainly didn’t expect it to be that bad.

But it was. It was horrible. To this day I still consider it as the blend that defines the nadir of the spectrum. When I smoked cigarettes I once got a pack of “100% Pure Guaranteed Donkey Shit Cigarettes” during a trip to Tijuana, just for the lark of it. 965 was worse than that.

Why? What could possibly have been so terrible?

To quote myself from my review of it over at tobaccoreviews:

It started off poorly, dry and hot like a sunstroked meadow, and it was downhill from there.

That’s essentially what it was. It really was like smoking hay to me, unclean, dirty hay that had only recently been home to a family of hoofed creatures with poor hygiene.

Savagely hot and unclean really sums it up for me. It was the most unpleasant experience I’d ever had smoking a pipe.

I studied the tobacco. It looked perfectly normal, smelled perfectly normal — basically, in every way it gave the appearance of quality tobacco. But when I actually put it to the match, it tasted nothing like tobacco. In my review I liken it to “smoldering rubber or plastic”, and that was not an exaggeration for emphasis, that’s exactly what the nuances below the infernal heat tasted like.

I found it impossible to believe that anybody could like this stuff. Was it me? Were my tastebuds somehow radically different than everybody else’s? for just this blend?

But I wasn’t going to quit after one bowl. Perhaps it was because I was still a relative neophyte, returning after my long hiatus, and wasn’t accustomed to full balkan blends. But no, that couldn’t be it, because I had already decided I really like Commonwealth, British Woods, Squadron Leader, 1792, and a few other blends, just as strong or stronger, latakia or virginia. Perhaps my tastebuds were off after some strange, forgotten meal.

Whatever the reason, I was determined to try it again, and again, to see if it would get better, to try to get some idea what anybody else could possibly see in this blend. So, over the course of six months, I would force myself to go down on it give it another try, hoping that I could solve this mystery. But it was not to be — each bowl was as terrible as the previous one.

To be fair, I must admit that somehow a few sips actually had some kind of vaguely grassy flavor that wasn’t objectionable, in fact was actually almost even nice, but then it would quickly subside, then it was back to sucking rubber through a blast furnace.

I cannot account for it. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now. Maybe it was a bad tin, maybe I was the victim of some heinous prank, like the spouse who randomly kills some innocent victims instead of her husband by putting cyanide capsules in some bottles of tylenol. But no, because I eventually traded what remained in the tin (about 90%) for Kingfisher (another bad blend) with another piper, and he said it was fine, just like the other 965s he’s had.

So the mystery remains, and I expect it always will.

The shell shock to my tongue is now part of my muscle memory. This blend was so off to me, I figured Dunhill was doing something very very wrong. Or maybe Dunhill tobacco has a certain flavor that only a small percentage of people can (or can’t) taste, like PTC, an organic compound that tastes very bitter to some and tasteless to others based upon their genetic makeup. I don’t know. But whatever the reason, if this was a quintessential Dunhill blend — which, by all accounts, it is — then obviously Dunhill is not the blender for me. I’m even wary of trying their expensive pipes…

Given that there are so many other great blenders out there I don’t believe I’m doing any disservice to myself by denying myself their products. Indeed fans of Dunhill should be grateful to me that there’s one less person to take away their manna from them.

To those who love 965, I’m glad for you. Really, I am. I think it’s great when people find the thing that gives them real pleasure. But then Titanic won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1998, Banksters are rewarded for bankrupting us with 700 Billion of our money, and yet another War Monger received the Nobel Peace Prize today.

Maybe I’ll just go smoke my pipe now… anything other than 965, that is.