Dunhill Three Year Matured Virginia Review
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Kevin Godbee - Dec 5, 2017
- 5 min read
Kyle Weiss
At the time of this writing I’m sitting in unseasonably warm conditions for Northern Nevada. I’m outside smoking in a t-shirt, shorts and listening to Pérez Prado. I have a French press full of coffee, Black Friday nonsense is happening somewhere in the world and I couldn’t give a damn. There seems to be a constant food hangover stretching from my navel to my upper ribcage. For me, the holiday season could be well over. Call me a Scrooge, I’ll be proud of it. Christmas is a sham as a whole–at least the version everyone thinks of. To be honest, I’m not sure what the holidays really are for me. I’m not religious, I have a strange family set, and in general, the color scheme, smells and soundtrack are puke-worthy. I’m known as being the slightly intoxicated Grinch starting in December. That’s my tradition. The world is in discomfort and chaos: welcome to the last pipe tobacco review of 2017. At least the crab cacti are in bloom.
Some weeks ago, I believe the Lane rep visited my former place of employ, the Tinder Box (we parted on great terms, don’t worry) and left something behind. A basic, blue-labeled tin of Dunhill pipe tobacco. I had never heard of it seen it grace the shelves of the shop. Usually this time of year I’m happily puffing away on something Latakia, but since I seemed to do that all summer when I was supposed to be in the shade with Virginia, the topsy-turvy theme happening this year apparently knows no bounds. The tin has no description: “Three Year Matured Virginia.” That’s all I had to go by.
Once opened, the contents of the tin reveal a mostly milk chocolate-colored jumble of tobacco ribbons, with the occasional tawny and tan strip thrown in for good measure. It smells clean and fresh, there’s that basic fruit component on the nose that promises at least a touch of nicotine to calm my holiday grouchiness. Moisture content is what one would expect out of STG/Lane products, something I personally consider “just right for smoking right now.”
Packing and lighting Three Year Matured Virginia is an easy and forgiving procedure. Whether dodging a Prius, its windows blocked by 45% post-consumer waste shopping bags and fair trade coffee stickers or testing constitution of your liver on the porch with a 12-pack, one can still load a bowl correctly. First puffs on this tobacco is promising. Mouth-feel is a bit on the gritty but pleasant side…this isn’t a meaty tobacco, and it introduces itself as such right away. It has a brut edge to it, but is fig-like while being cracker-crisp. It’s slightly yeasty, toasted, and has a tad of quinine bitterness on the tongue. This tobacco is fun right out of the gate–will it keep up?
The first quarter of the bowl there a more flavor-melded experience similar to what I mentioned about the first light. The natural sweetness breaks way to the dry qualities of the tobacco, but come right back with every tamp or relight. Smoke is consistently voluminous but not mouth-coating. This is nice when the senses are reeling from overexposure to food, scented pine cones and unrealistic car-with-bow commercials. This tobacco practically smokes itself, but I think it is better to help it along.
By the halfway mark Three Year has a diminished amount of “oomph” that I had gotten used to from the first quarter, but the flavors change it up a little. Consistently I was getting a more of a thicker, spiced plum nuance; cassia and white pepper on the background. It’s here the tobacco reminds me how easy-going it really is without being soulless. This is that kind of smoke you get lost in what you’re doing, be it listening to music, reading a book or rolling your eyes at the decoration pissing contest going on across the street between the neighbors. Putting the pipe down on occasion is a smart idea here, for the sweetness really kicks up a bit more on rested relights. I’m pretty sure red Virginia is a component in this mixture, the smell and the mouth-feel are about right for it. Red Virginia really keeps the false “cigarette stink” mitigated in VA-only blends, or at least so I’ve been told when I’ve been around others and bothered noting such reactions. The added bonus is the mellow oven-baking-something warmth it lends usually about midway through the bowl.
Three quarters down is a little lackluster. The volume of everything gets turned down, something I wish happened when going into the drug store for cold medication and I’m being subjected to a particularly loud, boisterous instrumental version of “Silent Night.” At least I could fix the tobacco’s performance fatigue by choosing pipes that were a little wider in the chamber, and packing a little more solidly at the bottom. Fortunately this tobacco is rather springy, and blockages were never a problem. Do smoke it a little slower if you decide to choose wider-bowled pipes: although a very cool-smoking leaf, this tobacco can get a little hot (naturally) if more exposure to oxygen is happening with the increased combustion area.
The last part of the bowl gives, to my satisfaction, that rich final hurrah I look forward to in finishing a smoke. The flavors go more molasses and tad meaty, with much of the dry and even tart qualities gone completely. It’s a nice change at this point of the smoke. There are no ashen flavors. One of the consistent things of Three Year Matured Virginia is cleanliness. While never being weak, the tobacco is inoffensive to the senses and others around. I found it paired wonderfully with hot coffee, and copious amounts of whiskey, necessary for getting those damned holiday ear-worm songs plaguing the mind. Nicotine is satisfactory and just-right; you won’t find yourself spinning like a dreidel nor will you be wondering if there’s any brandy in your eggnog.
You’ll all have to pardon my curmudgeon ways during the holidays. As much as I am thankful for my family, supportive personal relationship and catching up with friends, it’s a crazy time. It’s really important to set time aside for ones self and pipes are not only an excuse, but a necessity. Your cousins might think you’re weird, grandma might recount stories about how she bought a pipe for grandpa every year since he was in the war, and the neighbors might wonder where your clothes went when you finally had too much mulled wine, but Dunhill Three Year Matured Virginia might be just the companion you need to get through the home-stretch of the holidays. While it isn’t a ground-breaking, monumental tobacco, the spirit of it is as basic as the tin label, Lane did a good job putting together something that can be enjoyed year round. Whatever you celebrate, do so safely, with spirit(s) and love, and puff merrily everyone. See you next year.
Written by Kevin Godbee
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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Great little article. I see your Christmas cactus is in full bloom also.
Thanks Kanaia!
Yeah, it’s in full bloom. It’s about a “christmas-y” as my domain gets. I even refer to its less common name, the “crab cactus.” Happy smoking!
Thanks for a well-written, nicely illustrated, and informative review; but I’ll bet you find nothin’ but coal in your stocking this year!
Kyle, Do not feel bad about not getting in the xmas spirit! Since my kids grew up I have struggled through xmas every year. My feeling is that it is largely a commercial enterprise that I do not wish to participate in. I will try 3 year matured when I get a chance. Gary
My kids are gone as well, but the Christmas marathon sustains itself with Grandkids. I’ve often begged my wife to take a short vacation at Christmas and go far away from cities and malls. Alas, no such luck.
How in the hell can You get the Christmas spirit in the friggen desert. I have no lawn just crushed rock and cactus of all kinds!! Beavertail,Cholla,Ocotillo,Barrell, you name it I have it in the yard.There’s not even any snow at the top of the mountains. Hell with it I’m putting on the sun-screen and I’m going fishing!!!!
Jon