Tabac Grande 
Sultan Pasha (2016)

A Tonka Absolute blanketing canvas has this reminiscent of Areej and Bortkinoff creations.
It is essential to apply this to the skin as the animalics blend so beautifully to my corpus.
Think opening a humidor that has been lined with an ancient Varnished Oud and Salmonid fed Cedar. Notice the gentle smoking of smoldered Kopi Luwak. A sweet aura that implies richness sans cloy.
Dry down is a natural cleansing breeze from the Sea.
Then I realize that I have been drawn in by the balance between Immortelle and Tonka which comforts me in it's impression of perfect grooming.

Imagine if you will that you are staying at a hotel in Casablanca and the manager has invited you to the Cigar Lounge. On entering the first thing that you see is how rich and decadent the furnishings are. We are talking about dark leather bound chairs, mahogany tables with the walls fitted with dark wooden alcoves. To your left there is a old piano with someone playing a Jazz tune and straight ahead is the bar with a man dressed in a tuxedo serving a customer a whisky drink. You take a sniff of the air and it's filled with cigar smoke and alcohol from the nights festivities.

As you take your seat in one of the leather bound chairs the manager signals to a waiter who brings you a leather bound pouch. As he places this in front of you he mentions this is the finest pipe tobacco laced with a vintage special reserve cognac that is kept in the walk in humidor for when the mayor visits.

You take your Sherlock Holmes pipe out of your pocket in anticipation and then proceed to open the pouch of the finest pipe tobacco. You close your eyes and inhale deeply, the smell of rich aromatic tobacco laced with a fine smelling alcoholic Cognac greets your senses. It's warm and spicy with a slight sweet muskiness coming from the cognac. This smells fantastic as it is blended so no one note overwhelms the other. You take another sniff and you notice a dry woodiness that smells like cedar giving the scent that dry warmth.

This is what I get when I smell this scent, rich tobacco with a beautiful alcoholic Cognac that has a slight sweetness to it. It's aromatic and at the start it almost has a lacquer quality to it with what smells like dark molasses. But I think it's the dark resin with a touch of immortelle which is the signature Sultan Pasha accord that is in a lot of his scents.

The projection is soft and the longevity is good, I've had it on my skin for about six hours and it's still there. So all in all a very rich, decadent smelling aromatic pipe tobacco of the finest quality.

holy smokes!!!! it's like getting slapped in the face with a fresh wet tobacco leaf...rich, dark , animalic tobacco...I pick up on the smell of hay in there...just can't seem to pull my nose away from my hand...it has an addictive and hypnotic effect on me...i've ben sampling quite a bit of the Sultan's mystical alchemical brews and this is definitely one of my favorites...being a huge fan of vintage powerhouse fragrances, this one checks all the boxes...this is what John Wayne would smell like...get a touch of immortelle...i know that a lot of people are not big on immortelle, but I happen to like it a lot , so that adds another bonus to this fragrance for me...also , being a big fan of animalics , i love the animal notes trickling up from the base...projection seems to be real decent...the other noticables to my nose are woods, oud, and a little amber...another wonderful gift from the Sultan...

Damp, rich, chewy, resinous, animalic, and musky. These are the words I would immediately use if I were to tell somewhat what the biggest and loudest tobacco fragrance I have smelled to date smells like (this fragrance of course is the subject of this set of notes: Tobac Grande.) Hyraceum, cognac, and tobacco start this one off with a bang - at once it is musky, alcoholic, and densely filled to the brim with the richest pipe tobacco you have ever smelled in your life.

There is a sweetness that seems to emanate from the cognac, although the tonka is indeed here tucked behind the tobacco as a chewy, sweet, and slightly spicy undertone - there is cade here, which is more often than not used to create a leather tone, but here to me smells more like a semi-sweet woodiness enveloping the very center of the tobacco, and as it grows more and more, you begin to smell the bitter chocolate, and fruity herbal qualities of the osmanthus, which all work together to create a environment for the tobacco, liquor and musk to grow in: it brings to mind those masculine environments where these rich cigars, and dark liquors are smoked and drank, but without the 'burnt' notes at the end of a lit cigar or smoked pipe.

The ambergris is here as quite frequent in the SPA attars I have smelled thus far, but the salty qualities are hard to detect - instead it works as a strong sparkling and heavenly quality to the honey which adds layers of warmth and sweetness to the composition overall - this, you could imagine, acts as the dimly lit lights within the room where these gentlemen are hanging out and as such seem as much the 'lens' through which all these notes are seen through, and as such it isn't so much that the tobacco itself seems sweet (although the benzoin and the tonka are indeed huge factors adding to the chewy and somewhat fruity aspects of the tobacco) but that the overall 'tone' of the composition is warm and comfy.

You can feel the licorice here (as the tolu balsam occasionally transmogrifies into) as a dark unsweet scandanavian variety. Cedar is in the background with the cade producing somewhat smokey and smooth woody effect that last for a great duration of the fragrance (although occasionally, the total effect pairs with the coffee produces a leather effect similar to that in Arquiste's Nanban, of the dark coffeehouse with deep and rich stained wood, and syrupy resins spilling occasionally onto the leather seats.)

There are in fact some notes that come out from hiding (castoreum and heliotrope for sure) every once in a while, but seem to be memories, as if spun by the conversation of these self-same gentlemen.

Overall this one is the richest, tastiest, and best 'pure' tobacco fragrance I have ever tried - with that being said, don't expect that this one is a one-trick pony - stare into the room long enough, and the tobacco will fade, and you will see all of the marvelous things adorning the room.

9/10

YT: Jess AndWesH

Grande indeed - this is an "empire fragrance" - whether Ottoman or British, a statement of grandeur, power and hyper-masculinty. I perceive both this and Aurum Anghkor as brazenly alpha-male fragrances. Where Abdesalaam Attar/Dominique Dubrana's work, which is similar in that it links oriental and occidental traditions in its creator's biography and aesthetic, has the crystalline clarity of a soul fully in touch with itself and the world, Sultan Pasha's have a raw, almost overpowering masculine physicality to them - they don't caress you, they punch, but not in a lean fight club manner, but in Ottoman or Victorian style: richly brocaded, opulent, yet free of any baroque androgynity. Tabac Grande is defined for me by its axis of hard core tobacco leaf (no pipe sweetness), coumarin hay, and the cuminy-salty note of immortelle, and while it's impressive, I unfortunately react adversely to some of the synthetics in it (it is 90% natural), suffering from headache-inducing sinus-irritation. To bad as it's a less austere take on sheer tobacco leaves than the wonderful, but very straight-shooting Virginia by Lorenzo Villoresi. After all its rich pomp and circumstance it actually calms down rather quickly within 5 hours to a pleasant skin scent. Headache aside, it's a neutral for me due to the immortelle. In sum I prefer either the sweet pipe tobacco approach of Odori (my go to tobacco) and the unrivalled purity of the all-natural Tabaco by Dubrana, but that this is a very competent composition by a promising perfumer is undeniable, for which I'm ginving a thumbs up.

I have to admit, at first whiff I thought this was perhaps a bit much for me - this isn't your polite tobacco fragrance, smooth like Parfum de Marly's Harod or rough and sweet like Tom Ford's Tobacco Vanille. No, this is 100% alpha-male tobacco, rich, moist, dark raw and unadulterated with cognac. I went through a tobacco-fragrance kick several years ago and kept coming across marketing selling the fragrance as "aristocratic old-world board rooms with leather chairs and polished wood carvings." You know, money, power, etc. But the fragrances hardly ever lived up to that. This... THIS smells like that, without ever capturing anything remotely "pipe tobacco-ish" as this is more about hand-rolled tobacco leafs saturated in cognac. Actually, it smells, from my recollection, a bit like Parfum d`Empire's Fougere Bengale, to which it shares a number of common notes.

The beginning is so thick and chewy, it really made me look to the floor for a spittoon like I'm in a bar straight outta 1900. The opening gradually began to grow on me - it's not that I disliked it, rather the intensity and darkness of the tobacco and cognac here is unlike anything else I've experienced so it takes a bit to regain my senses and make sense of which way I'm walking. As it develops, I definitely get some hay which reminds me of the aforementioned Fougere Bengale, along with the tonka that smooths it out some. Make no mistake, this, even with a touch of honey, doesn't become a confectionary holocaust by any means - there's some dark cocoa lingering in there that keeps it somewhat dark and bitter while floral notes help balance it out a bit though I admittedly didn't pick up any rose. Interestingly Bengali Oud is listed as a note, not that it's in PdE's FB, but the name connection nevertheless bears resemblance.

As this dries down further, it really becomes softer with a very appealing aura. The areas under my shirt where I dabbed some are still somewhat animalic and raw, but other, exposed areas less so and it's become warm and comforting. I do sense a bit of amber that gives it a warm glow along with woody and vanilla notes and the booziness feels, for the most part, long gone, like I'm ok to drive home now (or at least ride a horse if I'm circa 1900.) Ultimately I find this to be quite the alpha-male statement fragrance that has a certain vintage quality to it and perfectly enjoyable on a cold winter's night (and bonus that I don't have to worry about missing that spittoon on the floor - those spots must be a pain to clean!).