It seems that to most, aged tobaccos just weren’t a “thing” in the 80s. The shopkeep even offered him a discount because, “Nobody else is going to buy that old stuff.” There were many similar stories. A buddy of mine came back from one of these adventures with several dusty old tins of Three Nuns, long forgotten. We all started visiting tobacconists wherever we traveled, asking if they had any old stock in the back room. Over the next few weeks, many of the Drucquer’s hangers-on had similar opportunities to taste the old stuff that Robert was opening, and just like that, a movement was afoot. I have no idea if Robert was the first tobacconist to intentionally do this, but it certainly felt like something of a revelation that day. It was already one of my favorites in the shop’s repertoire, but those five years, the tobacco sequestered in its tin and forgotten about, had transformed it into something deeper, richer, more complex, and beautifully integrated. The tobacco we tasted that day was Red Lion, and the experience is one I’ll never forget. Robert was also a winemaker, and so no stranger to the idea of aging things. Five years before, he’d put away a selection of several of the shop’s blends to experiment with the effects of aging on them. Robert Rex, owner of the shop at the time, was usually pretty reserved, but as I walked through the doors, I noticed he was rather animatedly talking about the tin of tobacco in his hands. I wandered into Drucquer & Sons, as I often did during breaks from classes, and had my mind just a little bit blown. Even in the early 80s, we never thought about something going out of production, or changing formulae, or, more germane to today’s topic, benefiting from resting for many years in the tin.
It was a consumable commodity – something to buy, to smoke, and to buy again. It might be hard to believe, but there was a time, not all that long ago in the timeline of pipe smoking, when people didn’t even think about aging tobacco.
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