February 7, 2011 Brooks Whittington Portraits

Portraits: Marvin Samel

I heard that Marvin Samel, co-founder of Drew Estate cigars was going to be in town at the Up In Smoke on McKinney Ave. for an event over the weekend, so I thought I would stop by and see if he would be amicable to a quick portrait.

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I don’t know what I was expecting, but Samel is an extremely gregarious and interesting man. He answered every question asked by various people succinctly and in depth, and shot the portrait wearing both sunglasses, designed by Sting, and a jacket made from the hide of a cow, then put together using nothing more than d-ring looking clips.

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Samel was also kind enough to hand me one of the new blends Liga Privada has been working on, called MF-13. I have an MF-4 somewhere that I never got around to smoking, so they have been working hard on this blend. Can’t wait to try it out.

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Drew Estate Marvin Samel
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Brooks Whittington

I have worn many hats in my life up to this point: I started out as a photojournalist for the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, then transitioned to photographing weddings—both internationally and in the U.S.—for more than a decade. After realizing that there was a need for a cigar website containing better photographs and more in-depth information about each release, I founded my first cigar blog, SmokingStogie, in 2008. SmokingStogie quickly became one of the more influential cigar blogs on the internet, known for reviewing preproduction, prerelease, rare, extremely hard-to-find and expensive cigars, and it was one of the predecessors to halfwheel, which I co-founded.

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