Worse I ever had was with the initial release of Ashton's VSG line. My buddy had a Fuente connection from CF and got us a few pre-release boxes...I think they were the Enchantment, but I'm not sure. We worked together and had a great client meeting where we made a huge sale, so we ended the day early and went to our favorite Portuguese restaurant for a late lunch. We ate flaming meat on a sword, tons of seafood, and of course, a good amount of their homemade sangria....I talking a decadent amount of food & drink....we celebrated like gavones.
We went back to his house because the cigars had arrived the day before and I wanted to grab my box. We decided to smoke one to cap off a nice day before I headed home...and I thought it prudent not to drive in my current condition and hang out for an hour or so. We did the whole ceremony of checking out the box, carefully opening them up, taking in the aroma of the tobacco, cutting them, tasting the cold draw, and them lighting them up. My first impression was fantastic...I absolutely loved the flavor and started to puff on that thing like a locomotive.
I wasn't a third of the way through the stick and it hit me like a ton of bricks...BANG! Like Fieldsy, I got the sweats, the stomach started to growl and twitch, and my mouth started filling up with volumes of saliva. We were outside on his deck, so I stood up, walked over to the railing with my back to my friend and started releasing the saliva into his flower bed like a garden hose hoping that the inevitable would not come true. With that marginally successful tactic, I put my cigar in the ash tray and gracefully excused myself saying I had to hit the head....and to not tip my hand at being a lightweight. I got to his bathroom and started praying to the porcelain God in a desperate attempt not to throw up and make those kinds of noises in a strange bathroom. I must have been in there, head in the bowl, taking deep breathes, spitting like crazy, for 15 minutes...but I staved off the puking...barely. I dried the perspiration from my face and neck, splashed some water on there and finally came out. I went into his fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, went back outside, and proceeded to make believe I was smoking the rest of the cigar until I finally left with it in my mouth. I must have been white as a ghost and my buddy Jay never said a word...but then again, he was feeling no pain either. Once I got in my car and out of his neighborhood, I threw that thing like Nolan Ryan out the window!
After that day, I don't think I smoked another cigar out of that box for quite a few years....giving most of them away. They were indelibly marked on my brain as puke inducers....even though I knew all that sangria had a huge impact on how I got to that point! But even knowing all that and having smoked stronger cigars than those since, I still get an uneasy feeling every time I see a VSG cigar to this day....15 years later!
