Trains, Planes and Automobiles!

I actually manage to amuse myself by how much work I can do over the course of a week, in fact I can still tear around like I did 20 years ago and more important – I still enjoy every minute of every day. ‘Not bad for an old boy’ I hear some of my friends saying 🙂

walk-in_davidoff_humidor_cambridgeSo, my week started on Sunday with a visit to our gorgeous Robert Graham shop in Cambridge where Davidoff have just installed a sooper dooper new walk in humidor adjacent to the sampling lounge.

I spent half a day merchandising the humidor with a delightful range of premium cigars, hopefully our customers will agree it’s a step up from the last version of the walk in humidor. Needless to say, I was sampling Davidoff Nicaraguan Toro’s whilst merchandizing the humidor 🙂 We will be stocking an extensive range of our favourite Davidoff cigars over the next week or so. In fact outside of the lovely Davidoff shop in central London, this will be the best range in the UK.

Our Cambridge shop has a mouth-watering range of premium cigars, pipe tobaccos, single malt whisky wine and champagne and chocolates as well as a super helpful retail Team headed up by Cailin Morrison (my Partner Ron’s son) I’m looking forward to organizing some great Davidoff cigars tastings in March.

Monday and I zoomed off to Italy for the day. I searched for a particular restaurant that I had heard has a comfortable outdoor smoking area but the taxi couldn’t find it! So I stopped at another restaurant with an outside seating area but after 4 attempts at lighting the patio heaters, the staff gave up as they realised all the gas bottles were empty!

They then very kindly invited us to enjoy lunch with our cigars inside the restaurant. I reckon that was very nice of them as well as super illegal/breaking the smoking ban so I won’t mention the name of the restaurant… But I will go there again in future! We smoked our way through some 1986 Davidoff Dom Perignon paired up with a couple of bottles of Ruinart Rose to celebrate a very successful business transaction.

Wednesday and it was time to head up North by Virgin trains to visit Turmeaus cigar shops in Liverpool and Chester. First class is rather civilized on the train and there’s Wi-Fi on-board which is pretty fast so I thought great opportunity to do some site testing on the new iPad… Only to find that my website is blocked for inappropriate content by Virgin! Shock! Horror! Don’t they know that cigars are a legal product?!?! How ridiculous.

I decided it would be a ‘Cohiba day’ and smoked a robusto, Siglo IV and Genios whilst visiting the Turmeaus shops. I love the contrast between the modern Liverpool Turmeaus shop and the very traditional Turmeaus Chester shop. Both have a comprehensive range of premium cigars, pipe tobaccos and plenty of accessories.

And yes… You are welcome to sample in store and chat to the very knowledgeable staff including my lovely Liverpool Manageress who started in cigar retail with me many years ago and Calum in Chester who is one of the few cigar specialist in the UK who has passed his Master of Cigars exam! Calum’s a very bright chap and terribly enthusiastic about cigars so we are sending him on some additional training to Havana next month with kind assistance of UK importers Hunters & Frankau.

I also bumped in to another Calum in Chester – the young Gentleman who sprung for the £40,000 Regius cigar. Calum has just returned from Nicaragua where special Regius cigars were blended and made to his own taste and specification. I really should plan on a trip to Nicaragua sometime soon.

Herfing in HamburgThursday and I was heading back to the airport for a long day at our Hamburg La Casa del Habano. I smoked Bolivar 109’s with Christoph and bumped into one of my earliest herfing chums Keith (Cap’n Keith) who was also in Town for a few hours. We managed to squish in a bottle of Champagne whilst chatting about business so it’s fair to say a rather good day was had by all 🙂

This week’s raspberry goes to the stupid politicians who are wasting their time and no doubt our money by trying to legislate to ban smoking in cars where children are passengers. A law that would not be possible to govern and manage and are people really so thick as to smoke with children in the car?!

We are very busy planning of our next auction which will be a huge online auction with over 250 Lots expected to be listed and sold on the Online Auction website… Think of it as a sort of cBay instead of eBay! We have a wonderful variety of Lots entered including Davidoff, Dunhill, Pre embargo, aged, rare, mature and limited edition. We also have some interesting singles selections and part boxes so there’s something for everyone’s budget that you won’t find in your local cigar shop!

Time to chill out for a quiet weekend and kick back with some decent Ailein Mor single malt and a box of La Flor de Cano Gran Cano UK regional edition smokes 🙂

Have a great weekend,

Peaceful puffing,

Mitchell

C.Gars Car Smoking Ban Cartoon