James Fox Provost Mixture

Appearance is a sticky dark brown rough ribbon. Tin smells of dried fruits with a fish sauce and soy sauce note. Tastes lightly sweet with savory notes. This is a red labelled tin.

The reviews of blends we dislike and blends we love are easy to write. Provost Mixture presents more difficulty. This blend is between a like and a love. One might expect a Virginia and Cavendish blend to be simple, but Provost Mixture is more complex than you might imagine. On opening the tin I get a slight whiff of something similar to Esoterica's Margate- a savoury smell, something akin to a soy and fish sauce, perhaps even Roman garum. It does need a little drying time out of the tin. The first part of the bowl may lead one to think this is boring, but press on. Lovely notes emerge, and Provost is medium strength as the smoke progresses.

Good stuff! I discovered this tobacco a few years ago and fell in love with it. I don't know why it is not more popular than it appears to be. Smooth, rich tobacco flavor with a hint of spice to it. It's an all day smoke for me and one I never seem to tire of. Pairs great with a morning cup of black coffee or tea but is just as good with an ice cold beer on the front porch watching the sun set. Wonderful daily smoke!

I've read where they've said (whoever "they" are) that you should smoke X oz. of a blend before reviewing it. And sometimes it might indeed take a couple tins to get a good handle on a blend. BUT then there are other blends, where half way through the first bowl, you think, "Oh yeah, this one's a keeper". Well ,for me this is one of those blends.

Now, I have smoked a bowl of Provost mixture every night for the past week , usually as the last bowl of the night. Tonight I smoked two in a row. I do not hesitate to award this blend a four-star rating. Every time I smoke a bowl of this, I think, "My God this is good tobacco".

This one is kind of a chamaeleon of sorts... apparently it is just virgina + cavendished virginia, but on the first bowl I thought I tasted a perique-y taste like a va/p. Tonight I got the essence of latakia that others have mentioned, then later it gave way to a more oriental-y type taste. Also, I find notes of cocoa and raisins throughout. This seems more of a sipping tobacco, for although it has yet to bite me, the bowl gets pretty hot if I start to chug it...yet strangely, the smoke does not ever seem to get too hot or harsh...FWIW I have been smoking this in a deep but narrow, thick walled bowl, and let it air out for 30 to 60 mins. before firing. If I had been in charge of naming this blend, I'd have called it "Rico Suave". Lmao. No kidding.

I'm very impressed that this blend was created from nothing more than virginia tobaccos, bright and black. Generally I dock half a star when I feel the blend may be a little too ahh pricey but this time price doesn't deter me in the least, it was worth every cent IMHO. Good good stuff. Highly recommended.

A most excellent blend that seems to fool many of us.The toastyness of the Virginia Cavendish along with, I suspect some Virginia Sun cured (which by the way is also called "oriental") and grown in Virginia as well as Greece and Turkey, give this blend a mistique! Hearty and out front, delicious with a rounded balance and flavour. After one pipeful you'll want another right behind it!

Update: The tin, (stash in a mason jar) I was smoking was 2003. I just came from the porch where I had another pipeful of Provost. Smoked this in a large Canadian James Upshall. I will take back the sun cured leaf, I don't think it's there. This blend will really fool many because it tastes so...english. It's a very refined Virginia flue cure (bright) that with the cavendish just works like no other I've tried. Four stars and wish I could give it five.

The initial aroma out of the tin (described by one reviewer as raisins and rum) reminds me of the brandy soaked fruit cakes my Grandma made for Christmas. Rich, heady (almost wine-like), dried and candied fruit, gingerbread, then the grain and straw scents of the Virginia “comes creeping on little cat feet“. By the scent, at first there seems to be some sort of very light casing or sweetening going on, but it doesn't interfere with the soft but full tobacco aromas.

Another note, my tin has a different label than the one shown, It has a very plain one of those EU type labels with the huge health warning taking up half the label. It has no blend description other than, “Fine Smoking Mixture”. (I guess that's because they had to squeeze all the rest of the label text into the top half, above the huge legal health warning.)

Upon lighting I caught only the slightest hint of the out-of-place sweetness from the light casing I had noticed in the tin aroma. Mostly what I tasted was the lovely sweet & tart Bright Virginia leaf. Whatever else is in the blend, it seems to spotlight and cool down the sugary, spicy, delicious, bright leaf.

I like it, I love Virginia tobacco, and I really enjoyed this stuff. It's not as complex as one might hope, but still good. Smooth, sweet and cool. However, the price is too high. It's pretty good, but there are too many better tobaccos out there with lower prices.

I give it 3 stars.

At the opening of the tin, Provost greets you with a very dry scent, something very “regular”, faintly sweet/sourish & smoky.

Light & golden Virginias, fine-to-medium ribbon, intermingled with very dark/quasi black unsweetened Black Cavendish in short ready-rubbed form.

At the first charring puffs one wonders if this is a mild EM… I understand who smells Latakia for sure… also some spicy notes of Orientals. Piquant to the nose, does this have Perique ? I'm pretty confused.

The flavour is not sweet at all, nor bitter to the committed smoker. The BC is the main player. Saying it better: everything in this blend is about this spectactul unsweetened BC, offering a wide share of flavours which are very difficult to describe (smoky, spicy, malty, woody), over a neutral base of semi-sweet Virginias probably of African origin. Right or wrong, this BC proves to be of the K&K family, something like the Black Virginia (or the one used in Dark Fragrant) on steroids, very very much more complex.

Provost grows as the bowl progresses, both in strength & body. At mid-bowl the initial sharp edges leave place to a pleasant piquancy, and some increased sweetness. The piquancy disappears to the nose too, and I'm finding myself trying to inhale through the nostrils a quasi-EM aroma. My Dunhill 3110 Tanshell shows all her good qualities with this blend. The second part of the bowl is very rewarding: all the fatures of Provost are in a perfect balance, an exhilarating citrusy note builds gradually up. Strength never exceed the medium mark.

No gurgle, no tongue bite, no insanely hot pipe. Just the palate slightly scorched due to a bit overly enthusiastic puffing.

Like all the K&K produced blends, Provost needs long idle time in the unsealed tin before use, as it came semi-wet.

Four shining stars, no doubt !

Casper is on to something with his Cavendish comments. There's no shortage of blends that involve Cav, but everyone seems to pay attention to a mixture's Va/Lat/Burley content.

I'm no exception. I don't know what to call this aside from a Cav/Va.

Pure Va smokers won't love this. I don't love this. But I like it a lot, and it has a role in my rotation. After I've had a bowl or two of Va in a day, and I want a change of pace, this is exactly what I want. There's good Va flavor, and also something dark and earthy.

This is a firm favourite of mine. It's a tasty and reliable English blend. Some may say it has no latakia. But there is definitely something latakia flavoured in it!

Tasty, cool and easy to smoke. It's just the sort of tobacco I love.

I just happened to pick up a tin while I was getting some cleaners. I hopped in my car and loaded up a cob I use for testing new blends. I didn't even make it home before I called the tobacconist and had them hold the rest of the stock for me.

I've not been smoking pipes long enough to really understand what makes this a great blend. All I know is that it is phenomenal. I highly recommend trying at least one tin sometime in your life.