Quote Originally Posted by mooster View Post
Maybe it is just the American Spirit. I should have said "I read" rather than "I know"; I've read that a lot of perique is sold to the cigarette trade. It was my (faulty?) assumption that it was in others as well.
What happened with American Spirit is that by the late 90s the Perique farms had mostly died out, and there was only one farm left, which was down to its last few barrels, and the owner was thinking of throwing in the towel, which would have been the end for perique. The owner of American Spirit approached the farmer and promised to buy as much as they could if he'd try to get production back up. Then the Daughters & Ryan company set up more facilities and farms to revive the perique tradition, and the rest is history. As ubiquitous as perique seems now, a mere 15-20 years ago there wasn't miuch of it going around. VaPer fans would have been out of luck.

Here's a good article about "the last perique farmer"...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/us...ique.html?_r=0