H. Upmann Petite Coronas

Posted on January 1, 2015 by atgroom under Current Production, H. Upmann

And so it begins, Dusky Beauties, season three: we open on a shirtless boy in the bush, dirt on his pants, blisters on his fingers and sweat on his brow; alone but for a small fire, a bottle of dark rum, and a H. Upmann Petite Corona.

It was a hard decision, the comparison cigar for the H. Upmann vertical that will form the first dozen or so posts of the season, as there isn’t really a default Upmann like there was with Montecristo and Partagás. At first I thought about the Connoisseur No. 1, a cigar fits the size requirement (which is to say it is neither exceptionally short, nor long, nor fat, nor skinny, and not oddly shaped in any way), and is very widely held by the members of Cuban Cigar Website. I didn’t have one in stock and time was of the essence, so I took a tour of the major brick and mortar stores in Melbourne, all of whom turned out not to carry them. I was in my final choice of store, the La Casa del Habano in the Grand Hyatt, and marvelling at a fellow customer spending $3500 on 60 regular production cigars, by the time I realised that I would have to make a compromise. The LCDH didn’t stock my second choice, the Magnum 48 and so I settled on choice number three, the well sized but not especially well known or well liked H. Upmann Petite Corona.

The construction of the cigar is good, the draw firm but not overly so. The first notes aren’t great; bitter, with tar predominating and a chemical aftertaste. After the first few puffs it mellows to a sort of vague straw flavour. Mid-tobacco. A very generous soul might claim a coffee note.

Upmann is one of the oldest current Cuban cigar brands, having been founded (as Min Ron Nee tells it) in 1844 by the hermanos Hupmann, two of four German brothers who had all emigrated for the island to make their fortunes. The business was a big success, and prospered under the brothers and their descendants until the First World War when German businesses were blacklisted in Cuba. By 1922 the bankrupted Upmann factory and the brand were sold off to a major tobacco conglomerate. Upmann languished until 1937, when the Menéndez family, flush with cash from the recent launch of their power house brand, Montecristo, purchased the Upmann factory and propelled it back to greatness.

As a brand Upmann sits somewhere at the bottom of the top tier of Cuban cigars: it doesn’t have the brand recognition of Romeo or Montecristo, the prestige of Cohiba, or the popularity of Partagás, but it is still a global brand with a large market share. It has had a lot of discontinuations over the years, but it hasn’t been cut to the bone like some of the smaller brands, and even gets the occasional new release. Overall, I think it should make for good vertical: the typical Upmann profile is one of light, clean tobacco, with the occasional hint of straw, leather, and creamy sweetness. With a bit of age they can be fantastic, and some real gems lurk in their special releases. Finally (and most importantly), the Upmann line is short enough that I won’t be stuck smoking the bloody things all the way into June.

By the mid-point the Petite Corona has improved, and is cruising along as a decent, but by no means excellent cigar. It is dry grass and leather, vaguely nutty, but still with tannic tang. I’m down in the backblocks of my ancestral sprawl, where I’ve lit a small fire that is a particularly poor example of the art. The wood is far too green, and more than a little wet, and I couldn’t be bothered with proper technique, choosing instead to ball up some paper, throw on the odd piece of damp bark and leaves, and hit the mess with my jet lighter until the flames caught on something more substantial. As always in life, you get what you deserve, and I have gotten a smoky, sputtering mess that is not much good to anyone, and a row of blisters across my knuckles where I got a little too fresh while rearranging some burning sticks. As is typical at the Groom compound, I’m sipping on a Bacardi Gold and ginger beer, that is taking the edge off my afternoon pretty nicely. Normally I find it a good match with cigars, being sweet enough to take the bite out of the tar, without being cloying on the palette like some other soft drinks. I’m not sure what it’s doing to the Petite Corona, but certainly isn’t improving it much.

The end of the H. Upmann Petite Corona is surprisingly mild, dropping to light tobacco. As always, I smoke it down to a punched nub: the smoke is scorching in these final moments, but not all that bitter. Overall it has been a mediocre cigar; not hugely complex, and not offering any especially interesting notes, but also fairly smooth and inoffensive. It would be perfectly acceptable as a cigar at a drunken poker game or barbecue, anywhere where the principal focus isn’t on the smoke. It does not set the bar high for the rest of the Upmann range, and it certainly wasn’t as good as either a Monte 4 or a PSD4.

Upmann Petite Corona on the Cuban Cigar Website

Romeo y Julieta Churchills

Posted on June 10, 2014 by atgroom under Current Production, Romeo y Julieta

A Romeo y Julieta Churchills: age unknown, but it’s old. The design of its single band is the one used on dress boxed Churchills from the 1970s until 2008, so it’s definitely within that window. The printing on the band is terrible, the embossing more or less non-existent which, coming out of Cuba, doesn’t really mean anything, but as the bands started to improve around 2002, I’d say it’s probably from before then. The band colours are faded, and the white portion is yellowed and stained with oil. The wrapper shows signs of shrinkage, and has the fine, dry, papery quality of very old leaf. Pure speculation, but I would say 1980s. I spark it up, and the flavour is very light and cedary, with something in there evocative of newsprint.

I first met Marylou Wang at the birthday party of a Dutch acquaintance, in a plush teppanyaki joint in the good part of Shanghai’s French Concession. When I walked in the maître d’ glanced up from his newspaper and led me without speaking to a private room in the back, to the only white people in the place. The party was the standard mixture of Europeans – a Frenchman, a few Germans, a smattering of Italians – but my eye fell at once on the token Chinese girl at the table. For all their willowy charms, Chinese girls are rarely elegant or sophisticated to the western sensibility. The urban middle class did not exist in China at all until the mid-1990s, and even today children are raised by their grandmothers, and their grandmothers are products of the Cultural Revolution; hunched crones who squat in the street and spit sunflower seeds while bartering over live ducks, and who play Majong to all hours, cackling uproariously. They are a generation that the government raised to be uneducated peasants, in an era where the universities were shuttered and an accusation of intellectualism was enough to get you sent to a forced labour camp. This girl though, in a plain black cocktail dress that artfully accentuated her full bosom, with a simple string of pearls around her neck, light, natural makeup, and an easy, confident poise, was different. She spoke perfect English, with a mid-Atlantic accent. “Hi,” she said “I’m Marylou Wang.”

I saw a lot of Marylou Wang over the next couple of weeks. She had travelled extensively in Europe and studied culture and fine art, and as far as I could tell, all her friends were European. She ran a fashion boutique and was always dressed impeccably; the grace with which she floated down the street was a higher form of the art than even those privileged blonde girls from the best schools in the west have developed. She always knew a dimly lit cocktail bar nearby, and drank dry martinis and neat whisky unflinchingly.

The thing I could never quite put my finger on though was where it all came from. If she was from Shanghai or Beijing I might have understood it, might have put her down as the child of some well-connected party cadre or whatever passes for old money in 1980s China, but she wasn’t. She was from Wuhan, the very same industrial shithole on the Yangtze where I spent my formative years. I had attended the Wuhan No. 6 Junior School, and I knew what went on there. I held up my fist to swear an oath to the spirit of the Young Pioneers, and wore my red scarf and sailor uniform just like everybody else. I attended weeks of regimented dancing classes so I could dance a waltz with the class monitor at some ceremony or other (as a foreigner I was excluded from bayonet practice). I also attended the morning school wide eye exercises, and the abacus lessons, and the art class where students were graded on how accurately they copied the pictures in the book. My family home in China was below the lowest standards of public housing in Australia, but it was palatial compared to the one room apartments that my classmates’ families lived in in those countless bleak concrete tenement blocks that surrounded the Wuhan No.6 Junior School. How was it possible that this delightful orchid had blossomed in that brackish swamp?

At the halfway point there is not a huge amount to this cigar; it is light to the point of non-existence, a dull, dusty, cedar flavour. A hint of straw. Younger Romeos can be flavour bombs, with strong, complex, floral aromatics, stone fruits and chocolate, and perhaps this one might have offered those back in its salad days, but today they are gone, its oils evaporated. Cigars don’t turn to vinegar with age, they never become unpleasant, and this one isn’t, but left too long they lose their flavour, and this cigar, unfortunately, has been left too long.

For our fourth date I took Marylou ten-pin bowling, and it was there that I began to realise that the whole thing was an act, her whole persona a perfect, studied performance. She showed up in a tight, grey, satiny dress, cut halfway up the thigh, with matching bowling shoes, gloves, and custom drilled ball. I’ll never forget the way she slunk up to the lane, and how her leg shot out and folded behind her as she released the ball, and how her plump backside popped in that dress. She looked every inch the professional, and I prepared myself for utter humiliation, and yet her final score was in the low 60s, less than half of my mediocre 127.

I fell for Marylou just a bit, and I think she fell a little for me too. We dated for more than a month before I finally took her to bed on New Year’s Eve. In bed it all fell apart. Her pubic mound was unshaved, a forest of silky black, and on top of me the fullness of her figure, normally her greatest asset when artfully arranged in satiny dresses and under diffused lighting, worked against her. Her belly folded, and her breasts hung low, with creases around. I suspect she was older than she had let on.

Worse than this, far, far worse, was the loss of grace. “Ohhhhh” she screamed. “Fuck me.” “Ohhhhh. I’m coming, coming.” Her orgasm was fake, and ridiculously over the top, acquired, I can only imagine, from the one place in Western media you will never find any semblance of grace or elegance: pornographic films. It was ironic, really, as perhaps the only place where the average Chinese girl finds an understated grace is in the bedroom; in their trembling, their virginal gasping, and gentle stifled moans. Yes, Marylou was an actor, and a great one. She never dropped her character once.

Once it was over and I lay growing turgid in a pool of our mingled fluids, I watched her slink naked to the bathroom, that glorious behind, uncovered now, swaying back and forth in the moonlight. Ah, Marylou.

I called her for weeks after that, but she never would see me again. I think she knew the jig was up, that the façade had come down. Eventually she sent me a message. “I like you, but I don’t want to be your sex friend.”

Ah, Marylou.

I was hoping for a last minute turn around and to some extent there is one. The final inches of the cigar are fuller, heavy notes of toast and a thicker, darker wood, a little barrel aged bourbon. I’ve been sipping on a Coca-Cola sporadically throughout, and it now serves to remove the slight bitterness from the final inch, and leaves a light, burned caramel. Aged cigars are sought out for their elegance, which this definitely has, along with a balanced, delicate simplicity, but there isn’t a huge amount of flavour. Its best days, unfortunately, are behind it, but it burns nice just the same.

Romeo y Julieta Churchills on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Serie D No. 4

Posted on January 1, 2014 by atgroom under Current Production, Partagás

Sunday afternoon, Hong Kong. I had planned to catch the tram up Victoria Peak and smoke a Partagás Serie D No. 4 on the walk down, taking it on a tour of leafy little back paths, colonial era fortifications, and some of the most expensive real estate in the world, but unfortunately the tram had a 90 minute wait and I don’t have time for that nonsense. My next thought was the nearby Hong Kong Park, in front of the puffin cages perhaps, but alas, Hong Kong prohibits smoking in its parks and gardens. The result is this, a dusky beauty brought to you from the miscellaneous streets and alleyways of this sweaty metropolis.

The Partagás Serie D No. 4 is about as default a cigar as exists in this world. The Monte 4 is still, as far as I know, the biggest mover, but number two, and by all accounts gaining fast, is the D4. It’s a good size for today’s punter, which is to say it’s short and fat, and honestly it’s not a cigar I’ve ever had much fondness for. This example though opens well, with mild tobacco and straw, and I swear that I can detect a hint of spring onion in the back palette.

Hong Kong and I go back a long way, back to the old Hong Kong before 1997, when it was the last remaining diamond in the crown of the British Empire. It was early 1989, and my father was ready to change his life. He had applied for a highly paid position on an Australian government aid quango, setting up an accounting university in Wuhan, China. It was a job for which he was vastly underqualified. An accountant by training he’d worked for six months as an auditor with KPMG before deciding that he couldn’t spend his life counting boxes. Those who can’t do teach, and he’d spent the next decade or so teaching high school accounting, mainly as a volunteer abroad in third world island nations. In the year before his application for the Wuhan job he was working as a first year accounting tutor at a second rate technical school. Unsurprisingly, his application was turned down.

His second choice was to move his young family to an acreage outside of Frankston in Melbourne, where I was to be enrolled in Frankston Primary, and later Frankston High (non-Melbourne readers will not understand this reference, but suffice to say, Frankston High has produced a far greater number of teenage mothers and career criminals than it has globetrotting cigar aficionados). And then came June 4th. And then came the incident in Tiananmen Square.

An inch or so to the wind and the D4 is still quite mild, with a little peppery spice and a muddy overtone. There is just a tang of diesel exhaust on the back end, which is more pleasant that it sounds. The D4 is the descendant of a grand old line of lettered cigars, begun sometime in the 19^th century and discontinued in the 1930s. In the original incarnation there were sixteen cigars, running letters A to D and numbers one to four. The letter represented the ring gauge, with A being 38, B 42, C 48 and D 50; the numbers represent the lengths: one is 170mm, two 156mm, three 140mm and four about 125mm. The D4 was revitalised in the 1970s to fulfil a perceived need for a Partagás robusto. Over the coming weeks and months I plan to smoke my way through a few different Partagás specials and limiteds, many of which are revitalised members of the original letter series, or latter day expansions of the line. Expect the factoids mentioned in this paragraph to be referred to a lot.

After Tiananmen Square the project that had so roundly rejected my father was in turmoil. The chosen staff had spent a couple of months in cultural training in Australia, and were just weeks from their scheduled departure when they saw footage of tanks in China’s capital and heard reports of thousands of students being massacred by the Red Army. Frantic phone calls were made. Letters of resignation appeared on desks. With the hard targets of their joint venture contract to meet the quango heads were forced to go down their list of rejected applicants looking for anyone who was still willing to go. My father was, and by August I was a resident of Red China.

Even in 1989, Wuhan was a major metropolis, but it was by no means a cosmopolitan city. Today its business district is all mirrored glass high rises, but back then the entire city was row after endless row of utilitarian concrete apartment blocks. Lying deep in the heartland on the banks of the Yangtze, Wuhan is known as one of the three furnaces of China, firstly because of its oppressively hot and humid summers, but also because of Red Steel Town, a district to the north of the city where a great deal of China’s steel is smelted. The river was a short bicycle ride from my home and from the top of the levy bank I watched an endless parade of tugs and barges: coal and ore going in, giant steel girders going out.

China in 1989 was making its first faltering steps toward openness, but particularly in the provinces it still had a long way to go. White people were almost unheard of; when my sister and I ventured out to the market outside of our compound old women would point to us and whisper in their grandchildren’s ears. Both brunettes we had it easy: the children next door were blond haired and blue eyed, and wherever they went strangers would reach out and touch them. Cars were a rarity back then, every street crowded with thousands upon thousands of bicycles. Every night when the traffic died down platoons of old ladies would emerge from the high rises to sweep the streets with wicker brooms, their only discernible purpose to move the dust from the ground into the air.

China, in a word, was chaos. Every month or so we would need a break, a brief gasp of the rarefied (unpolluted) air to which we westerners were accustomed. Air travel in China was a rare privilege in 1989, reserved only for high ranking party members and those lucky enough to travel on business. The only airline was the government CAAC (which the expats jokingly referred to as China Airlines Always Crashes), flying old Russian jets that groaned and rumbled and landed hard. You could fly to Hong Kong only from Shanghai and Beijing, and so for us escaping China for a few days generally meant a train ride to Guangzhou. Today a high speed train makes the journey in a few hours, but 1989 was the era of the Iron Rooster; steam trains, with classes ranging from Hard Seat (a wooden bench in with the livestock) to Soft Sleeper (six to a cabin, bloodstained sheets). The journey took an unpredictable amount of time, variable depending on how often and where the train broke down. You knew you were going to be stationary for a while when you saw the engineer pedal past your window on a bicycle, heading back in the direction you’d just come from. Once in Guangzhou you made your way to the border, where, within a giant Stalinist gothic edifice you would fight your way through the crowd of peasants to the window for your permission to cross. Once granted you would be herded through a series of large cages, your papers checked again and again, being jostled by Chinamen all the while, before finally, some hours after you first began, you would be granted permission to leave Red China.

Released from the cages you would cross the bridge over no-mans-land, over a well mown killing field and a tall, razor wire topped fence. At the end of the bridge some glass doors would slide open with a smooth hiss, revealing a pristine white tiled customs hall, the Union Jack hung proudly over an aspidistra in the corner. “Welcome to Hong Kong” the guard, resplendent in his crisp blue uniform, would say, his accent a plummy, well-practised British. Moments later you would step onto a monorail and glide silently through the lush forests of the New Territories, disembarking twenty minutes later in the heart of Kowloon, back in civilization. It always felt like you were waking from a bad dream.

I finish the cigar on public pier number nine, overlooking Kowloon, watching the Star Ferries come and go. The cigar has remained mild and pleasant the whole way through, only turning on the heavy tar in the final puffs. In the final analysis it is a fine Cuban smoke, a good hallmark for the Partagás marque, but unfortunately, to my palette at least, it’s not as good as a Montecristo No. 4.

Partagás Serie D No. 4 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Ramón Allones Gigantes

Posted on June 17, 2013 by atgroom under Current Production, Ramón Allones

Paris. City of lights. City of love. City of an all pervasive and indefinable stink.

I’ve just had a big meal in a small café. A few glasses of wine. An apéritif. A digestif. A cigar feels about right. I have with me a Ramón Allones Gigantes with some age on it. Eight years, maybe ten? I wouldn’t think more than that, it burns too black. It has the old band at any rate, so at least five.

Don’t expect a lot of tasting notes on this one, readers, as honestly, I’m well in the bag already. I can tell from the first puff though that this is bueno tobaco. Very smooth, with a hint of spice. Who are we kidding, cigars taste like tobacco, and so does this one. Beautiful, rich, smooth Cuban leaf.

The sun goes down as I survey the square, puffing occasionally as the French go about their business. In the window of the café an old French woman smiles at me. “Habana?” the waiter asks. “Oui. Si bon.” I order une café. Espresso.

The coffee is a good compliment. Strong notes of it is what I’m getting. It’s hard to say if it’s coming from the cigar or not. Certainly tastes like it. I’m also enjoying the wine, a cheap Bordeaux. I’ve never been a huge fan of red wine with cigars, but on a balmy summer night in Paris what else would one have?

I set off for a walk, down who knows what Parisian boulevard. I’m headed for the river. A black man accosts me. Afro-French? What’s the politically correct term? I’m sure the French would say negro. Emphasis on the neg. He says a lot of words to me in French, but the only two I understand are “cigar” and “hashish.” I assume he either wants one or is trying to sell me the other. I wave him away. I used to have a friend once, years ago, in China, who would occasionally ask me for a cigar so that he could pack it with alternating layers of cocaine and hashish. It was quite a party.

I find myself outside a church I recognise. It’s not a famous one, and not much by Parisian standards, but something in its familiar silhouette cuts through the fog of wine and tobacco and good times, and takes me back, back five years, back to the last time I was in Paris, and back to Audrey.

Audrey was an underwear model and perfect in every way. I had dated her for a year or so two years prior, but ultimately we’d grown apart, our relationship devolving into a continuous, passive aggressive argument. They say that for every impossibly beautiful woman there’s a man who’s sick of putting up with her shit, and for Audrey, I was that man. Or perhaps it was her who was sick of putting up with my shit, I don’t recall. Probably a bit of both. By the time world turned and took me to Paris we’d been broken up long enough that we’d forgotten about the arguments, but not long enough that we’d forgotten about each other. I knew that she was in London – once upon a time we’d planned to take that trip together – and so when I got to Paris I sent her an email. “Meet me under the Arc de Triomphe at noon” I wrote “or, if you don’t want to see me, steer clear, because that’s where I’ll be.” I picked the Arc because it was the only French landmark I knew with an eternal flame. I thought it could be symbolic.

She didn’t steer clear.

I got there fifteen minutes early, and she was there before that, sitting on the grave of the Unknown Soldier in a short red coat. It was cold, just before Christmas, and she had a flush in her cheek and that same old sparkle in her eye. I had a small heart attack when I saw her, and as I touched her shoulder and she turned to me I think she might have had one too, but once my arm slid around her familiar waist, once I’d kissed her velvet cheeks (both of them: we were in Europe), I knew that we were back, back to the best of our relationship. We were back in love.

We held hands, and ran up the stairs of the Eiffel tower. We made love for the first time in her shithole hotel room, just as the sun went down over the Parisian rooftops. She was looking out the window at the sunset and I stood very close behind her, just barely touching her, just barely smelling her hair. Without speaking she walked away from the window, lay down on the bed and looked at me, so I went over and undressed her. I remember she wore matching underwear, sort of a mottled green pattern. She’d planned this. As we reached the sweat drenched climax of our passion the phone starting ringing, the front desk trying to tell us that we’d have to pay an extra 15 euro to have two people in the room.

She was perfect and Paris was perfect. Three days we spent together, walking around, young and in love. This cigar is good, but that was better. She had a mole underneath her right breast. A small waist, and hips that were cantered slightly to one side, but you only noticed from behind.

We didn’t want to go back to the hotel and face another round of angry ringing, so instead we walked the streets at night, finding dark little boltholes in which to devour one another, the thrill of icy fingers sliding beneath warm garments, probing, seeking ever warmer, deeper crevasses in the flesh, giggling and gasping with the chill and excitement; carnal pleasures in alleyways and parks, deserted stairways and banks of the canals.

I find myself at Notre Dame. Where else would I end up? There’s a star on the courtyard here that indicates the starting point of all distances in France or something like that. The cigar is getting bitter now. Tar and nicotine. The best part. It has been burning unevenly for two inches now, but as I sit and contemplate the old cathedral it evens itself up. A good Havana. Castro would be proud. Off to one side some girls are drinking wine, swigging from the bottle. Outside a church in the middle of the night. The most famous church in the world. Paris.

On our last night together she blew me in an elevator. It was three in the morning and we’d been spooked out of half a dozen other places by security guards and midnight ramblers, when we came upon some apartment building with a door that was slightly ajar. We took the elevator up to the sixth floor, but didn’t disembark. I remember the head of my penis was very red and the eyes that looked up at me were very blue. We weren’t quite finished when the elevator began to move. I pressed every button while she did up my fly. We got out on three and walked the rest of the way down, arm in arm and laughing. We passed the middle aged man who had pressed the button in the lobby. He didn’t look impressed. Paris: the city of lights, but the streets are dim in the night-time.

And that was that. I walked her back to her hotel, kissed her goodnight, and a scant few hours later was on the TGV to Zurich, she on the Eurostar back to London. I saw her again a few times over the years, in London once, and Tokyo, but it was never the same as Paris and after a while she emailed to say she’d decided not to see me anymore.

I head back to my hotel. The ash is jet black. This is not an aged cigar at all. Tar and nicotine.

The nub of the cigar finds its final resting place in an anonymous trash-bag on the Boulevard de Strasbourg. Maybe Rue, I can’t remember. You should always nub a cigar, people. You hear cigar aficionados say all the time that they tossed a cigar after two puffs because it wasn’t up to their exacting standards; “life’s too short for bad cigars,” they say. They’re wrong. It’s disrespectful to the farmers. Think of Alejandro Robaina, that one hundred year old sea turtle. It’s the oil from his palms that give cigars their sheen. How could you throw that away?

Ramón Allones Gigantes. A great cigar. Tastes like tobacco.

Audrey, I miss you. My Paris will always stink of you.

Ramón Allones Gigantes on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Montecristo Open Regata

Posted on February 3, 2013 by atgroom under Current Production, Montecristo

The Montecristo Open line was introduced in 2009 as a cigar for the everyman; a cigar for the new smoker, the casual smoker and the teenage daredevil. Supposedly they are approachable and mild, a simple pleasure. They’re not intended for the aficionado market, but, as is the way with these things, the aficionado market is exactly the people who write the reviews, and I have never seen a new cigar get savaged like this one was. Flavourless and boring, they said! Life is too short to waste it smoking Montecristo Opens. I’m not sure how sales have done, but I see them around almost every time I go into a cigar store and I’ve been offered sticks from time to time by people who I consider to be everymen, so I suppose they’re doing alright. It’s a tough gig Habanos S.A. have for themselves, really, because they’ve discontinued so much that to the aficionado any new release has to justify itself as a worthy use of the tobacco that could have gone to their discontinued favourites, and that is always going be an uphill battle.

I was sent a single of each of the Open series shortly after their release in 2009, and have never smoked any of them (although I lost the junior to someone who said “oh, do you have anything smaller” at a party where I was handing out Mag 50s). When selecting this one my hand lingered for a moment on the Eagle, but I just couldn’t face the 54 ring gauge. This then, is the Montecristo Open Regata, a Petit Pirámides, and, I suppose, another failure in this blog’s stated mission of smoking exotic cigars. I make no apologies.

I’m having the cigar with a beer – not usually a good choice with cigars, but to my mind a casual, simple, unsophisticated drink, and the one most consumers of the Opens will have in their hand on the golf course, at the buck’s night, or outside the maternity ward where this cigar will be smoked. Beer is an everyman’s drink.

I clip it, light it, and begin. The draw is good, the construction un-reproachable. The flavour is fairly mild, but there’s nothing unpleasant about it; nothing to complain about.

NEWS FLASH! With around a millimetre of cigar burnt, as I placed it back on the table, the ash fell off, which is highly irregular in well-constructed Cuban, which usually maintain the integrity of the ash for several centimetres (and even then, it usually requires a vigorous tap before it falls). Furthermore, as I was taking this picture a slight breeze picked up the diminutive clump of ash, blowing it onto my sleeve. I can really see what the aficionados are talking about with this one. Poor ash retention: a big negative for the Montecristo Open Regata.

A few minutes later a second, slightly larger clump of ash fell, unbidden from this cigar, although the third held on sufficiently.

The first release of a cigar generally fetches a premium on the aged market because in many cases the first release is better. The Cohiba Siglo VI is the classic example of this: 2002 boxes are highly sought-after and command large premiums at auctions. Well, this Open, with three years of age, is a member of their first release. I don’t really know what to say about tasting notes. It achieves its stated intention, in that it is a mild cigar, with no complexity. There’s no spice, no cream, no mild bean or coffee, and at over half way there’s no bitterness or tar. What taste there is is the taste of smooth, mid tobacco. Honestly, the thing it reminds me most of is the Dunhill Mild cigarettes I used to smoke from time to time. I don’t consider that too much of a criticism; Dunhill Milds are a quality cigarette. I am enjoying the beer. Crisp. Hoppy.

In the final inch or so it gets bitter – not the bitter of tar and nicotine that I like, but an overly more chemical bitterness. It’s giving me a headache, honestly. Please note in these photographs the shittiness of my free cutter. I don’t usually use a cutter, honestly, but there’s really no other way to open a piramides and I can’t find my Xikar. Still, it did the job.

Ugh, actually, this is awful. I’m tossing it.

After tossing the cigar I notice a small melted ring on the edge of the cutter on which it had been resting, perhaps accounting for the chemical taste right at the end. Honestly, I really wanted to like this cigar, to come out against the reviews and say “no! The everyman has it right! Simple but great! The Monte Open is the way forward!” The reviews are right though. At best, this is an unremarkable cigar. At worst it is an unpleasant cigar. In either case it’s worse than a Monte 4.

Montecristo Open Regata on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Montecristo No. 4

Posted on January 22, 2013 by atgroom under Current Production, Montecristo

My years of involvement with the Cuban Cigar Website (the world’s best online Cuban Cigar encyclopaedia), my travels, and the generosity of my friends and benefactors, has given me a diverse and interesting collection of exotic cigars. They are singles in the main, many taken from commemorative humidors and the like, and at first I saved every one that came into my possession, either for my collection or perhaps to enhance some significant life event in the future. As the stack grew I began to wonder why. What was I saving them for? One can only have so many 50th birthdays and give birth to so many masculine children.

I have decided, therefore, to smoke them, and so they don’t burn entirely in vain, I’ll journal the process and publish the result. The cigars I will smoke here are rarities and exotics, things one only rarely sees reviewed, and while I don’t pretend to have the palate to offer any valid criticisms (and besides, what’s the point, as in the main they’re not things you can rush out and buy based on my recommendation), perhaps from time to time I might be able to offer a little insight.

All of which brings us to this, the first smoke of the journal, the Montecristo No. 4.

Alright, I concede, it’s not the most exotic of cigars. It’s not a Montecristo No. 4 from the 21^st Century Humidor (more on that later), or a Compay Segundo Monte 4 (more on that later), or some other strange beast, no, this is instead the humblest of creatures, purchased from a liquor store. I couldn’t see the dial on the hygrometer, but I’m fairly sure it would have read the same as the ambient humidity.

I light up the cigar, and immediately inhale the smoke into my nose far too closely and deeply, burning the inside of my nasal passage. When I’ve recovered I take a few puffs. The first notes are acrid and bitter. It’s too hot, too soon after lighting, and the cigar itself is a little dry.

For decades the Montecristo No. 4 has been the most popular cigar in the world (although I heard once that the Partagás Serie D. No. 4 was catching up), and this is how they are smoked, from liquor stores and head shops. No aficionado bullshit here, this is the everyman cigar, the absolute most common cigar experience, and the bar to which the lofty exotics to come shall be compared.

My first cigar in life was some three dollar Nicaraguan piece of shit that came in a plastic tube. I bought it for a buck’s night, and not having a cutter, I bit the end off with my teeth, removing about an inch of cigar in the process. Shards of tobacco came away from it whenever it touched my lips, and I found myself spitting after every puff, the flavour something akin to a rubber fire.

I don’t recall what I enjoyed about that experience, but I must have taken something from it, because a few months later I purchased a small plastic cutter and my second cigar in life, a Montecristo No. 4.

Oh what a difference, the flavours of Cuba, that delicious tang of finely toasted tobacco. Rich and spicy, bitter toward the end from the tar, but never that chemical rubber tang of an inferior smoke. There are echoes of that cigar in this one. There is certainly nothing unpleasant about it. The tobacco is slightly tannic, a little spice on the back pallet. Perhaps it’s all my talk of the everyman, but I feel that there’s a flavour of something rural that I just can’t quite put my finger on. It’s not the barnyard, or the earth, or the sweat of calloused hands, nor motor oil or sheep dip. Honestly, the more I try and pin it down the only thing I think I can taste is ketchup. Not sure where that’s coming from, but probably not the cigar or the glass of water that I’m pairing it with.

For years I kept a box of Montecristo No. 4 cigars in stock at all times, and presented them freely to anyone who was curious to try their first cigar. Once, in the early days of my habit I stumbled upon a website that seemed to offer prices well below those found in other online retailers. I bought a box, and as much as it hurt me to admit it at the time, I eventually had to face the fact that they were obviously fakes. Still, sunk costs are sunk costs, and so I mixed them one to two into my stock to hand out at parties. They were awful those fakes, real strips of tyre rubber, and I could tell more or less who had gotten what entirely by whether or not they ever asked for a cigar again.

More than halfway now and there’s a little tar, a little bitterness. A little nicotine too, no doubt. I include these photos to add some visual interest and because every cigar blog seems to do it, although I’m not entirely sure I see the point.

I remove the band, which comes away very easily. It’s embossed, which makes this cigar post-2006, although given its very dubious origins and storage history, I wouldn’t put a lot of stake in anything that can tell us. Here’s an aficionado tip: if you care about box codes, you shouldn’t be buying your cigars at liquor stores or petrol stations. Honestly though, this cigar has been pretty good. The burn has been dead even the whole way, no relights or touch-ups, and the draw is perfect, a good firm Cuban draw.

The bitter end; every puff leaves a tingle on my tongue and makes me salivate. I rinse and spit, but keep smoking. Perhaps it’s the nicotine, but while the end of a cigar like this is objectively unpleasant, I can’t help but love it. I find myself puffing deeper and more often at the end, making the cigar burn hotter and bitterer. I have a small head rush at the temples.

With a centimetre to go the cigar is burning both my fingers and lips, and shows no signs of extinguishing itself, so finally I make the call and toss it; it lands in a patch of wild mint that grows near the fence. Perhaps the mojitos of my future will take one some of the flavour of this Monte 4. I rinse the last puff from my mouth with the water, and the bitterness removed I am left with the aftertaste that follows the last swig of strong coffee.

I don’t have an especially well developed pallet, and honestly, I like everything, and so I don’t feel qualified to rate cigars at 94 out of 100 or anything like that. It is therefore my vague intention to rank all future cigars against this one (a device that I image will be discarded, perhaps as early as the next entry). One would hope, given the exotics that I plan to compare it with, that this cigar will remain perpetually at the bottom of the list, however, at this moment I feel like the bar has been set fairly high. A thoroughly enjoyable experience. I see why these are so popular.

Montecristo No. 4 on the Cuban Cigar Website

A Harem of Dusky Beauties

Category Archives: Current Production