Assuming that the above correspondence is legit, it backs up what my friends across the Pond have been telling me about Germains, namely that they play be their own rules. The owner doesn't need the income and could happily close the doors and go fishing. They believe that they produce excellent products that are ready to smoke on delivery.
I get their point of view. When I took up the pipe 45 years ago, nobody talked about cellaring. You went to your drugstore and bought a can of some codger blend, or went to your tobacconist, sampled some of their blends and took some home to smoke. If you were a regular, your tobacconist would make up a blend just for you. Maybe you bought a tin or two of a Dunhill blend or a couple of tins of Sobranie for a few bucks. And then you smoked it and went back for more. Cellaring? What the hell was that and why do it?
Maybe we fetishize tobacco, like we have coffee - watch an overamped yuppie disintegrate because the texture of the steamed milk isn't "perfect" - or pizza - goat cheese with gold leaf. We assume that tobacco straight from the store is incomplete, that it needs years, perhaps decades, maybe millennia, of aging before it is worth incinerating. To a blender that could be construed as something of an insult. To my mind, yours may vary, the fixation with the absolute benefits of letting tins sit for years, has reached the loony limit with blends being marketed that are "designed" to be aged for a decade or so. Sounds like a gimmick to me.
I like Escudo. I like it fresh and I like it aged. Fresh, it has more pepperiness. Aged, it has more fruitiness. But it's perfectly good to smoke right out of the can.
Balkan Sobranie was a very enjoyable smoke. But the 35 year old cans being sucked up by suckers on eBay in the blind belief that blends only improved with aging, are either mummy dust or damp wraiths. Tobacco doesn't last forever. There is no viagra for 35 year old latakia.
None of which addresses the ongoing problem with Stonehaven, namely that it has been, and continues to be, uneven in quality. The OP isn't the first, by a long shot, to get stuck with a bad batch. From the standpoint of the manufacturer it isn't their problem. How do they know that the product wasn't screwed up, mystically, by someone else?
It would be nice if they cared, but they don't. They don't have to. You can walk away mad as hell, but two more will take your place because of the hype and the folly that accompanies the search for unobtanuim.
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