Tobacco That’s So Brooklyn but Made in Belgium

I had no idea what the word meant, but inside the pouch, I found the strangest pipe tobacco I’d ever seen. It was dry and brittle and smelled like a barn, and if anyone else had given it to me, I’m sure I would have tossed it back. But Dario was a special case. In the years I’d known him, he introduced me to some of the best mushrooms, moonshine and cigars I ever tasted, and if he now recommended this packet of old straw, it seemed only fair to try it.

As I lighted the first bowl, what struck me was the heat. Without much moisture, the ribbons burned fast and sharp. Yet as I drew more slowly, a deep, earthen husk spread into my mouth, at once pungent and delicate, with floral hints that drifted above a rich and savory base. Over the next week in Italy, I smoked little else. Dario kept a brick of the tobacco at home, wrapped in golden paper with the words “Pur Semois” stamped on top, beside a drawing of a 1950s man and the name “Vincent Manil.” Before I left, I snapped a photo of the label, planning to buy some at home. This, Dario warned me, would be difficult. The tobacco was hand-prepared in the Semois Valley of Belgium and was nearly impossible to find anywhere else.

I confess to have taken this warning unseriously. For all of Dario’s epicurean talents, he did not strike me as a man likely to be versed in the nuances of online shopping. Surely back in the land of Amazon, I could find it with a few keystrokes. At home, I located Manil’s Web site quickly, showing three kinds of tobacco: the thick-cut Brumeuse that Dario smoked; a finer one called Fleur de Semois; and one in the middle named Reserve du Patron. But just as Dario warned, none of the major tobacconists carried them, nor did any of the pipe shops I frequented, and none of my friends had ever heard of the stuff. Months passed, and all I had left of the Semois was the lingering flavor in my pipe.

I come from a large family in which smoking of the sort I do, for flavor, is both common and cheerfully tolerated. At a typical family gathering, it is not uncommon for my father, uncle, cousin or brother-in-law to produce some newly acquired blend for everyone to sample and discuss. To have discovered this strange and magnificent new flavor and be unable to share it seemed like a communal affront. Finally, one of my cousins devised a solution. Scouring eBay, he found a woman in Belgium who sold trinkets from her home, and he wrote to ask if she happened to live near a tobacco shop.

The first package arrived in brown paper, and as I pulled back the label, the husky smell I had been craving bloomed in the air around me. Soon I was ordering a second package and then a third — not because I had smoked it all but because I never wanted to run out. I stockpiled the golden bricks in my basement, filling a large box until, one day in 2009, the Belgian woman disappeared. The packages stopped, my e-mails bounced and the box in my basement began to drain. By December, I was down to my last package. Peering into the empty box, I knew what I had to do.

The Semois River flows through the forests of Belgium in a region known as the Ardennes. To the outside world, the Ardennes is most famous as the site of the Battle of the Bulge, but inside Belgium it is better known as a getaway for city dwellers. One winter morning, I drove through the mountains to Manil’s home, a large stone cottage on the French border with callicarpa bursting in front. I suppose I half-expected Manil to resemble the figure on his package, with a slim suit and slick hair and a straight pipe stuck in his smile. Not quite. He is a large, lumbering man with knotty hands and a tangle of dark curls that bobbed around his beaming grin as he ushered me inside. We opened a bottle of Trappist ale and soon were joined by his wife, Gaëtane, a petite schoolteacher with huge, dark eyes, who twirled a hand-rolled cigar. As I tried to explain my fixation with their tobacco, Vincent and Gaëtane nodded calmly, as if this was a common story. What I couldn’t figure out, I said, was why it tasted so peculiar. “What do you do to it?” I asked.

“Ah!” Vincent said, gesturing to the window. “It is because the land is so special.”

“The terroir,” Gaëtane added.

“And the seed,” Vincent said.

“And the fog,” Gaëtane concluded.

“But what is that strange flavor?” I asked. “What do you add?”

“No!” Vincent howled.

“It is nothing,” Gaëtane said. “Only natural!”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/magazine/tobacco-thats-so-brooklyn-but-made-in-belgium.html?partner=rss&emc=rss