Pound For Pound: Oliva Delivers

Like almost every other novice cigar smoker I’ve met, I went immediately to the industry’s most established luxury brands for my early education: Cohiba, Davidoff, Romeo & Julieta, etc—just to establish a baseline.

But as I’ve always done (as is my way), I can’t help but be attracted to the overlooked and underrated when it comes to being both a consumer and a salesperson. It’s simply in my blood to want to give customers the best possible bang for their buck, not necessarily the most famous label; I want the same experience as a consumer.

Not that Oliva is all that overlooked in the grand scheme of things—having been around for 132 years and winning countless awards—but it still feels like an underdog. The Serie O (what I’m smoking in the above photo) gets great scores from critics and was named one of the 50 best cigars of the year by Cigar Aficionado. Look at any major cigar site and the feedback is pretty incredible. Yet, when I ask my amateur cigar-smoking friends about the brand, few seem to have heard of it.

I’m writing this blog today having finished my first Serie O, and my seventh overall cigar from Oliva. Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, I can’t imagine smoking anything better.

When it comes to whiskey, I look for two characteristics straight away when determining quality: weight and texture. Flavor comes after that. Call me crazy, but that’s how I work.

When it comes to cigars, I also look for two important characteristics right off the bat: burn and construction. Flavor comes after that.

You could have the best tasting whiskey in the world, but if it’s jagged and thin on the palate, you’ll never win over the masses. The same goes for cigars. You could have the most amazing taste experience, but if you’re pulling hard on every draw and dealing with an inconsistent burn, the experience is ruined.

I’m far from a cigar expert, but in the last six months I’ve gone back for repeat visits to cigars I know will deliver, time and time again, with a consistent burn and an effortless draw, manifested with huge billows of white smoke that spread like clouds across my patio. If the stick can also provide complexity of flavor, seductive aromas, and a whiskey pairing that knocks my socks off, I’m smitten for life.

The Oliva Serie O did that for me.

Nicaraguan Puro by design, the filler is made from Habano seeds grown in three different locations, bound with Habano leaf, and finished with a Habano wrapper. Whereas other top-rated cigars can be earthy, robust, and intense, everything about the Serie O is soft and seductive. It’s like cherry blossoms and cedar with a dusting of cocoa powder.

I can’t recommend it highly enough. Grab the Double Toro next time you come by the store. You won’t be sorry.

-David Driscoll

Instagram Live Tomorrow With New Riff Distillery

Tune in tomorrow at 4 PM PST to the @missionliquor Instagram handle and catch New Riff Distillery co-founder and distiller Jay Erisman if you want to learn more about their whiskies.

I spent most of yesterday tearing down the pallets that just hit our warehouse, organizing the bottles and getting the transfers ready for each of our retail locations. By the end of the week, there will be a serious amount of New Riff parceled out between Woodland Hills and Pasadena.

Having popped a bottle of both the BIB Bourbon and rye, I can tell you this: if you’re burnt out on trying new whiskies that don’t deliver for the dollar, New Riff will be the experience that gets you excited once again. The Bourbon is outstanding, but the rye is just other worldly. Made with 95% rye and 5% malted rye, both the nose and the palate are concentrated with a blistering intensity beyond anything I’ve ever tasted.

This is going to be fun.

-David Driscoll

Lots Of New Whiskey Coming This Week

It’s gonna be a busy week behind the scenes here at Mission with the arrival of a big new container. If you’ve been saving your pennies for a rainy day, I’m about to make it rain.

• New Bourbon and rye whiskies from New Riff Distillery in Kentucky—the hottest upstart to hit the state since Willett began distilling again.

• The California debut of Lost Lantern: the first true American independent bottler of 100% American whiskies (these will be exclusively at Mission).

• Our first arrival of 700ml whisky bottles from the UK, concentrated entirely on one product: I bought all the Compass Box Flaming Heart we could afford. Because can you ever really get tired of drinking a Clynelish/Caol Ila vatting? If you can, there’s something wrong with you.

• And, of course, for those dropping some coin on these new arrivals, I may have some other allocated treats to unlock.

Stay tuned! It’s gonna get busy; fast.

-David Driscoll

Instagram Live Repost: Talking Agave Spirits WIth Luneta's Jed Wolf

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mission Wine & Spirits (@missionliquor)

I had a fantastic conversation with Jed Wolf from Luneta Spirits yesterday, a label that I think is doing a fantastic job of curating the complicated world of uncertified agave spirits for the masses.

When your agave spirit is neither Tequila, nor Mezcal, you’re already talking over the head of 90% of spirits customers. When you have to call it Aguardiente de Agave because it falls under no legal classification due to where or how it’s made, you’re getting geekier. When your price tag is well over $100 for a 750ml bottle, you’re really pushing it.

Given its unbridled expansion and plethora of new labels, the uncertified agave spirits market needs more customers to survive. In my opinion, brands like Luneta are the gateway.

While I do consider myself a Bay Area refugee, with no real desire to ever return to my homeland, I do have my memories. And when I was a kid, there was no bigger force in the Bay than Digital Underground. Their videos played on the now-defunct Jukebox TV station 24/7, and we never got tired of watching them.

My wife and I gasped when we heard the group’s frontman Shock G was found dead in a hotel room last night. News reports will contextualize his importance with the discovery of 2Pac, but I’ll tell you this: more than twenty years after his death, most of what I loved about 2Pac as a teenager doesn’t hold up.

Whereas everything about Shock G and Digital Underground has only gotten better with time.

No matter where I am, no matter what mood I’m in, I will stop whatever I’m doing and start dancing if someone plays The Humpy Dance or Doowutchyalike. No matter how many times I’ve heard either song, which is thousands upon thousands at this point, they never get old.

R.I.P. Shock G.

-David Driscoll

Easter Eggs

I’ll be dropping stuff like this all over the website moving forward, as we continue to test out various options to discourage bottle flippers and reward loyal Mission shoppers.

And, yes, I’ll be expanding the pool of products as we go.

I thought I’d go do a little public Q&A today, as I’ve had a number of repeat questions in the email queue lately, and I think posting them here would be beneficial:

Can’t I just buy $100 of whatever I want and get a discount on rare Bourbons?

Negative—and there’s a good reason. We run low margins, or sometimes even negative margins, on many popular brands in order to stay competitive.

As an example, every time someone buys a bottle of Lagavulin 16, we actually lose money. So even if you were to compile a shopping cart of $10,000 worth of booze, but it only contained low margin items, there’s a chance we would actually make zero profit after the credit card fees.

Why is Mission charging me $35 for shipping a case of booze when flat rate shipping is $17.95?

Great question! It’s a glitch in our system and if this happens to you please email me right away. When bottles are pulled from different stores, sometimes our system charges you a shipping rate per store rather than for the consolidated rate. I go through our queue every hour to fix these as they happen, so don’t worry. But, please contact us if you have any concerns. I’m hoping to have this resolved soon.

How do I place an order for “hold for future shipping” off the web?

You can select Pasadena In-Store Pick Up to hold for future shipping. However, if the bottles you want are not all in Pasadena, that won’t show as an option. You’ll need to email me and have it done manually. Currently, there’s no way to place a pick up order and consolidate bottles out of multiple stores off the web. You can however place a pick up order out of any individual location and ask to have the bottles sent to your store of choice in the notes as a work-around.

See you at 3 PM PST for Instagram Live!

-David Driscoll

Uncertified Agave Expansion

I was joking with a friend yesterday about the expansion of uncertified agave spirits, and how new companies expect thousands of customers to spend $150+ on countless new expressions with zero context and almost no understanding of the market.

“These labels have an entire book’s worth of information on them, but no one can tell me in their own words why it’s good,” I said to my friend; “It’s like a bunch of guys all repeating the same thing someone else told them, thinking that’s what connoisseurship is.”

Have you ever heard someone talk about terroir a priori, as if simply understanding what’s in the soil meant the product was good?

I was always taught to talk about wine and spirits a posteriori, meaning you start with how it tastes and then—if, and only if, it’s good—you work backward as to why it tastes the way it does.

I’m all about selling unique, small production uncertified agave spirits to the masses, so long as we’re invested in the long game, rather than just a temporary fad. In order to expand their awareness, consumers need to taste as many different agave distillates as possible, and that’s difficult when bars are closed and bottles of wild agave spirits are $100+ for what represents a complete uncertainty.

That’s why I’m absolutely thrilled with the new five bottle sample pack from Luneta Spirits (check out their fantastic website by clicking here). Focusing on unique distillates from Puebla, San Luis Potosí, and Oaxaca, they’ve put together a tasty, interesting, and educational set that won’t break the bank, and that combines wild agave staples like cuishe and tobalá with exotic offshoots like papalometl, fermented in bull hides and distilled in tree trunks!

All the specs are on the website, along with photos and flavor charts that are detailed, but simple to understand.

I was so impressed I immediately reached out to Jed Wolf for an Instagram Live date, which is happening tomorrow at 3 PM on the @missionliquor site.

Check it out.

-David Driscoll

Start Buying Brunello—Seriously!

This past Saturday, I ate inside a restaurant for the first time in over a year.

My parents drove down from the Central Valley and, since we are all now vaccinated, my wife and I joined them at Angelini Osteria: for me personally, the best restaurant in all of Los Angeles.

We drank cocktails made with the completely underrated Etna Bitter, Contratto Vermouth, and Prosecco. Yes, of course, we ate the famous Pasta al Limone (pictured above, because a bowl of delicious pasta is always more photogenic than a piece of meat).

But the real star of the show? The bottle of 2016 Argiano Brunello di Montaclino that I brought with me from Mission, to pair along side the massive, rosemary-scented Bistecca alla Fiorentina that we split between the table.

You wanna talk about a showstopper, this bottle was all anyone could talk about—both my parents, as well as our server who we shared a glass with. After decanting for about forty-five minutes, it was a symphony of sour cherry, dusty earth, and savory spices, permeating our palates in waves with every sip.

All this from a $50 bottle that is only going to get better over time, so you can guess what I’ll be buying more of later this week.

Eric Guido from Vinous said it point blank last November: “There is no other vintage or category of wine that I’ve been looking forward to more than the 2016 Brunello di Montalcinos. The big question is: Do the 2016s live up to our expectations?”

The answer, my friends, is a resounding: YES.

From my personal experience, let me tell you that buying great vintages from the world’s best wine regions is like a savings account. Not simply because the wines will appreciate, but because you’ll be happy you have them down the line. There’s not one person in the wine business who isn’t kicking themselves for not buying more 2005 and 2009 Bordeaux. It’s just the nature of the beast; you always wish you would have bought more when you had the chance.

I’m telling you right now: you’ll wish you would have bought more 2016 Brunello by the time 2021 is over.

The wines are incredibly approachable right now, offering a seductive and often hedonistic mouthful of red fruits and supple tannins, but with balance and grace. These are not California fruit bombs. These are Sangiovese-based wines with both power and elegance, capable of pairing with a variety of fantastic foods, from grilled meats to pasta ragù.

And we’ve only got more coming. If you were planning to put $1000 into your retirement this month, I’d carve out $300 of that for 2016 Brunello, if you can.

That’s what I’m doing, at least.

-David Driscoll

No Country For Old Men

There’s an insightful moment in the Oscar-winning film No Country For Old Men where the sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, discusses the nature of Javier Bardem’s violence with another member of Texas law enforcement. The officer says to him:

“He shoots the desk clerk one day, and walks right back in the next and shoots a retired army colonel. Strolls right back into a crime scene. Who would do such a thing? How do you defend against it?

When the logistics of your everyday reality begin to change beyond any sort of traditional pattern or framework, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed—even scared!

As a retailer, how do you defend against a whiskey shortage today? By purchasing more whiskey to bolster that demand, right?

Wrong.

Because as soon as you stock up on supplies, the demand changes to hard seltzer. As soon as you buffer your store with hard seltzer, the demand changes from alcohol over to cannabis. Then from cannabis to something else.

The hard truth is this: today’s younger generations are not following any sort of traditional pattern that traditional marketers can defend against. Need more proof? Today’s LA Times spells it out:

A new study, based on a February online survey of more than 2,000 consumers, showed that preferences are changing rapidly between millennials and the younger generation when it comes to how they want to spend their leisure time.

That spells serious trouble for Hollywood because it’s no longer about finding the right kind of TV show or movie—superheroes, or stoner comedies, etc—rather, it’s a complete shift in preference of media:

Twenty six percent of Gen Zers in the survey cited playing video games as their favorite entertainment activity, compared to 14% for listening to music, 12% for browsing the internet and 11% for engaging on social media. Only 10% said they would rather watch a movie or TV show at home.

That compares to millennials (born 1983 to 1996), 18% of whom chose watching movies and TV shows as their preferred mode of entertainment. Video games were the entertainment option of choice for 16% of millennials.

If these trends stick, it could mean that video will become less important to consumers.

Not only are traditional mediums becoming less important to young consumers, traditional markers of quality are out the window.

How do I know this? Because I see it every single day in the booze world, as brands with horrible-tasting products become media sensations overnight.

But I also see it everywhere around me.

Let’s look at sports. Traditional boxing viewership is on the decline, as younger fight fans have moved over to MMA. But, this past weekend, YouTuber Jake Paul was able to draw plenty of fans over to his amateur boxing sideshow, complete with mediocre boxing on display.

The point: today more young people would rather watch a terrible boxer square off against another inexperienced boxer because he’s a famous social media star, rather than watch two experienced professionals duel in a serious fight.

What does that mean for competition?

Look at what Europe’s elite soccer teams are attempting to pull off: a rogue super league comprised of only the most famous clubs, competing against each other for huge ratings. Who cares about the constricting paradigm of traditional sports anymore? Let’s just cash in while we can and give people what they want to see, even if it means nothing in the grand scope of national competition.

-David Driscoll