Vauen N°5 Oxford Blend

Like most who have bought this blend, I was intrigued by the advertised Earl Grey tea flavouring. It is a taste that matches wonderfully with tobacco, in particular bright virginias with their citrus notes. Black tea in general also matches well with "deeper", earthier & smokier tobaccos, such as nutty burleys, red virginias and even latakia. I recommend matching various tobaccos with different types off teas, it can really enhance the experience.

Having noted this I was excited about this blend.

One thing about this blend, however, made me frown in disbelief: Black Cavendish? Really? I could not for the life off me see how this caramellish tobacco would match well with Earl Grey, especially not if it was the sweet vanilla-flavoured kind usually deployed in aromatics, which, after alll, is the type off blend is what this professes to be.

Is this a generic candyomatic formula with some fancy new earl gray flavoured chemical thoughtlessly applied as a topping just before shipping? Remember, those flavour additives can be ridicolously accurate. There is a brand off sparkling water here in sweden flavoured after a specific coco-coconut-pastry, and it tastes exactly like the real thing.

Now I obviously don't know how exactly it has been flavoured, perhaps it's by organic essential oil from bergamott and expensive, labour intensive black tea extracts quadruple distilled by aboroginals in the mountains off india.

But I can say this: the flavouring has been thoughtlessly applied to a generic VA-Bur-Cavendish candyomatic base.

When you open the tin, your nose is raped by an artificial sickly sweet smell and your fingers are greeted by a sticky mess off tobacco drowned in sugar, or worse. It does not smell like normal cane sugar, it smells more like those sweetening pellets that exist for coffee. My guess is that the sauce is corn syrup based on the smell & consistency.

Once your nosed has accustomed to aggressive sweetness you can actually make out a very pleasant and astonishingly accurate earl grey tea smell, the citrusy notes being most prominent.

When smoked, you can mostly taste the candyomatic base off caramelly/brown sugar black cavendish with some smooth vanilla. The sweetness is ridicolously strong. Beneath it there is a wonderful earl grey tea flavour is there with some citrusy VA & some pecan nuttiness (burley or the sauce, probably both). But it is all heavily subdued with the cloying, sticky, disgusting sweetness. It seems create a layer off sugar in your mouth that seems to make it impossible to make out any kind off nuance or complexity which might be there. It's such a shame because you get a hint off the potential that an Earl Gray flavoured VA/Bur tobacco has. The aggressive, artificial-tasting sweetness and awkward Cavendish ruin this blend. The flavours do NOT mesh well at all. This blend leaves me with the confusion & disgust you would get from ordering a steak and getting it drowned in chocolate sauce.

Drying out helps to make it less steamy. But nothing seems to cure this baccy from the flavour-blocking brown-sugar-tasting sauce.

This tobacco is one off the strongest ghosters I've ever come across, only Samuel Gawiths Grousemoor beats it.

I should have listened to that initial skeptic in my head, and I should have remembered how dissapointing Vauen's black pepper tobacco was (how can you make a pepper-flavoured tobacco and NOT include perique??).

I can see someone liking this, it does after all taste like sugar, earl grey tea & tobacco, which are all things people like. But to me it seems far too thoughtlessly blended to deserve anything but the lowest score. Above all I taste missed potential.