Greetings from sunny Los Angeles ! could be worse places to herf for a month but this is where I have settled, and am holding court round the swimming pool bar 🙂

I arrived in LA after a week in Las Vegas, staying at the fabulous Cosmopolitan Hotel and attending the IPCPR trade show at the Venetian / Palazzo convention centre. What an incredible week of meeting literally 100’s of friends and industry colleagues many of whom I have known for years and years.

The trade show is huge and showcases every cigar smokers accessory you can dream of as well as every non Cuban cigar you could wish. 

The show is my opportunity for purchasing massive quantities of accessories for the rest of the year at advantageous prices and then passing the savings on to our customers. Could this be one of the reasons why we sell so many humidors and accessories ?!  I also top up stocks of all our premium accessory and humidor ranges such as Daniel Marshall and Eli Bleu and make sure that we are selling the up to date and hot ranges of brands such as DuPont and Xikar.

If you haven’t seen Daniel Marshall humidors, you should check out the range on the website, Daniel has some beautiful designs and the humidors are great value too.

I spent time at the Cigar Family booth and met bumped into Josh Mirapfel and Carlito Fuente – I think we are in their good books as we were smoking Opus X at the time!

Always great to catch up with Marc and Mike from Palio – our recommended cigar cutter. We are very excited for the Palio lighter launch  expected in the next few months or sooner.

Bumped into old friend Gary Hyams, now working with Gurkha cigars. I think Gary was one of my earliest contacts when I came into the cigar industry so it’s always good to catch up and talk about the almost ‘old days’ !

Bobby from Fujipub newsletter was a good daily pit stop for a scotch and a chat- decadent way to start the day 🙂

Vito from the Sopranos was at the show again and we are importing his ‘gun’ cigar ashtrays which are very cool for Sopranos fans ( see photo!).

Cigar Journal made a splendid awards party which was great fun. Colin Ganley looked super smart as he announced a load of industry characters to present awards as well as receive them.

Vegas seems to have become cigar friendlier and smoking was of course allowed at the trade show as well as in the casinos and bars.

Herfing at the Venetian blackjack table with me were some of my usual crew including George, VV and Barry. Free Scotch all night= loads of smokes and we had some pretty decent winnings too 🙂

So after 5 days in Vegas with miles of trade show walking, scotch drinking, Opus X smoking, Blackjack playing….it was time to slow the pace down a little. We had flights booked to Los Angeles but decided to trash them and do a ‘road trip’ instead in  Blues Brothers style ! ‘ It’s 8 a.m. we have a tank of gas, half a box of cigars, its 110 degrees and we’re wearing sunglasses’ ! so off we went on a 5 hour chain herfing roadtrip to Los Angeles 🙂

I’m at the usual hotel and it’s as cigar friendly as the last few years, out almost every evening with clients and/or suppliers. Great to have a change of pace as well as some good al fresco cigar smoking.

Last night’s herf was at the Beverly Hills Gran Havana Room, this venue is soooo cool, I just love it. Great service and ambience and the food is pretty good too.

Meantime back at the London headquarters it looks like entries have started to arrive daily for our Winter auction ( date not even set yet!) and I’m looking forward to this event as they are always such good fun.

La Flor de Cano short robustos are still arriving in tiny allocation from Hunters and Frankau/Habanos so my apologies to the chaps on back order- we will fill soonest. Trust me this cheeky little smoke is well worth the wait.

I’m out of the UK for around another 3 weeks but I am always on email and friends are always welcome to email for any advice [email protected] or if you are in Los Angeles, you could always meet me for an Fuente Opus X by the pool 🙂

Peaceful puffing

Mitchell