It’s St. Patrick’s Day and Argus and I have just moved some furniture, so naturally the consensus is that we should find a pub and have a pint of the black stuff. We’re simple men in search of simple pleasures, and we eschew the chaos of the local Irish pub (where on St. Patrick’s Day they have music and food and whatnot – in years long past Argus and I made an annual tradition of going there and balking at their several hundred person line) in favour of the local non-Irish pub.

The place is empty, and the publican looks up from his paper with surprise as we stride in, thumping the bar and demanding two pints of Guinness. “Sorry, no Guinness” he says. “It won’t keep.” We survey the selection with some disappointment: Victoria Bitter, Carlton Draught, Cascade Premium Light. “Well, give us the closest thing you have.” He comes back with White Rabbit Dark Ale, which, sure enough, is ‘black stuff,’ but it’s a long way from stout, and a longer way from Guinness.

I had been smoking for a few years when the Montecristo Robusto Edición Limitada 2006 was released (I owned a humidor and kept it stocked), but I had not yet really started to collect. I was aware of the EL program, but I don’t think I’d ever actually smoked one when one of my friends gave me one of these robustos to look after for a while. I remember it sitting in my humidor, a glowering dusky beauty, and I remember its aroma which seemed to overpower everything else in there; a dirty bomb of musk and hard spice. This example has none of that, but it is a handsome brute with a nice, oily sheen.

We take our seats out in the beer garden, and I rifle through my pockets looking for my camera in order to take the inaugural shot for this review, but fairly predictably I’ve forgotten it (I will later find it inside my humidor). The pictures that accompany this entry will be brought to you courtesy of my Nokia 6300. The Nokia 6300 was released in January 2007 (mere months after the Montecristo Robusto Edición Limitada 2006), and I acquired one shortly thereafter. To me it represents the apex predator of the non-smart phone; the last great Nokia. In June 2007 the original iPhone was released and changed everything, and the Nokia 6300 and its like were quickly tossed aside in favour of the smart phone paradigm, but I’ve kept mine all these years. It’s smaller than an iPhone, it’s a lot cheaper than an iPhone, it’s easier to use than an iPhone, and I don’t really want my email to follow me about twenty four hours a day. There is also a certain satisfaction to be derived in owning the pinnacle of an antiquated technology; is a 30 year old Rolls Royce not better than a new Hyundai? (For the record, I drive a 1990 Mercedes-Benz). Perhaps it’s time though. With the Google Glass and the rumoured Apple watch thing being released within the next year, the sun is setting on the smartphone era, and rising on the era of the wearable computer. Perhaps it’s time I bought a smartphone. Perhaps the latest iPhone is the apex predator.

I slice the cap of the cigar and take an experimental puff. The draw is a little loose, and when I light it it immediately becomes apparent why: there is a hole down the middle of the cigar. At its mouth the hole is almost 2mm across, and it extends probably 15mm into the cigar. It’s not really a concern, but were it not for its position in the exact centre of the cigar I would probably wonder if it was a tobacco beetle’s exit wound rather than the product of an oddly shaped leaf or dubious roll. The cigar begins very well, with nuts over medium tobacco, and just a whisper of heavy cream. First class.

Argus has ordered us a packet of chips, paying the dollar premium for Red Rock Deli Sea-Salt over Smiths Original. Even the bartender was sceptical – “they’re basically exactly the same,” he told him. I’m always wary of eating something salty like this with a cigar, as I don’t know what effect it will have on my taste buds. On the surface the taste of the tobacco is much stronger, but it seems like salt might manifests itself in different ways, swamping the palette or shrinking the taste buds or some such. Beer and chips: I’m really not taking this tasting review too seriously. Salt on the palette deserves further study.

Nonetheless, the cigar is quite wonderful, very rich, with cream and cocoa. The burn is a little uneven, but nowhere near requiring a touch up, a vast improvement of burn quality over its 2000 brethren.

The beer is very light tasting for its colour, and honestly much more appropriate for a sunny summer afternoon than Guinness would have been. It’s a little burnt and hoppy, but not overpoweringly so. There is a trick with the standard beer jug used in Australian pubs where you can pour two glasses simultaneously by titling the jug slightly and letting it spill over the lip on one side. I’ve been doing it for years as a party trick, and it generally seems to impress, despite the fact that it’s actually an incredibly simple thing that anyone can do on their first attempt. I do it on this occasion, dividing the fifth pot between us, and as I do I quip “like King Solomon, I cut the beer in half.” “No, no,” Argus protests, “I’d rather see it go to you than see it split.” I chuckle and tilt the jug a little, giving him the lion’s share. “Then you my son are the beer’s true owner.”

Toward the end the cigar tars up a bit, and grows bitter, but it’s bitter cocoa and espresso, over obviously top shelf tobacco, and not at all unpleasant. I take it till I burn my fingers.

There is a criticism among cigar aficionados that all the more recent Edición Limitadas taste the same, and perhaps there’s some truth to that, but I’m not too bothered. For my money this cigar is the superior of the both the Millennium Reserve Robusto and the 2000 EL, not to mention the Monte 4.

Montecristo Robusto Edición Limitada 2006 on the Cuban Cigar Website

I’ve smoked a lot of Monte ELs in the last few weeks, and this one is the granddaddy of them all, numero uno, the 2000 robusto. It has the old non-embossed Montecristo band, faded with age to a light mauve sort of colour, and also that first EL band, the one before they realised they were going to have to put a year on these things somewhere (or perhaps the one before they realised they were going to do this more than once). It’s heavily box-pressed, thirteen years at rest having flattened the once cylindrical sides into a distinctly square shape.

I light it with a match, needing three attempts, which in turn makes the cigar a little hot and bitter in its first moments, however, when I back off it it soon settles down into a strong coffee flavour, with a hint of walnut in the aftertaste. The draw is very tight – tighter than Cuban, but looser than a coffin nail.

I’m accompanying this cigar with half a cantaloupe and some Diplomático rum, and on this still summer’s evening they’re both going down very nicely. If I’m honest the cantaloupe is a poor example of the breed – it’s practically flavourless – but with a cigar it works, offering just a very mild watery sweetness that clears the pallet and cuts some of the bitterness from the cigar’s aftertaste. The Diplomático is the same as ever, which is to say, great.

The cigar is burning unevenly and is in dire need of a touch up, but foolishly I only brought out my matches (they were right next to a torch on my desk, but on a whim I reached for the matches and only the matches. Hubris.), and you can’t really touch up an uneven burn with a match. Eventually it goes out completely, forcing my hand. It resists the relight: two long cigar matches almost burn my fingers before the smoke flows easily. I used to light my cigars with matches almost exclusively for a few years and I’ve never had anything like this kind of trouble with them before, which makes me think that something is amiss. Havana periodically changes the varietals of tobacco that make up their cigars, mostly to combat disease or fungus (it’s for this research that the elusive “Science” category of Habanos Man of the Year is awarded), and when this cigar was growing, probably in 1997 or 1998, it was the Habana 2000 strain that was in the earth. I’ve heard aficionados talk about fireproof Habana 2000 wrappers before but this is the first time I’ve encountered one.

When it’s burning though the cigar is really very nice, very balanced, and it wouldn’t be drawing too long a bow to call this chocolaty; a bittersweet bean and wood over medium tobacco. The burn remains appalling, and despite an attempt at a touch up a full inch of the cigar is unburned above where the coal seems to be, although its exact location is debateable, as only the smallest glow is visible in one corner of the charred portion. In moments like this I often think about Castro’s interview with Cigar Aficionado magazine, specifically the moment where he says that with a good Cuban cigar you should only have to light one corner and the burn will always even out. This cigar would not live up to Castro’s standard, but I suppose it was manufactured quite a while after he quit smoking.

The cigar goes out again, and exasperated I head inside to get a jet lighter, a Prince GT3000S miniature blowtorch that I bought in a Japanese hardware store and which advertises its primary functions as “jewellery repair”, “optical glass work” and “softening false teeth.” The torch claims to burn propane at 1300°C, but the asbestos wrapper resists even this inferno, glowing red, but not catching fire. For fully ten seconds I rain hellfire upon it, and as a result it is charred, but in no sense ablaze. I subject it to the furnace again, and eventually it succumbs, moments before my lighter runs out of gas.

At the time of writing Melbourne is in the grip of a heatwave, the hottest summer on record, and for this reason I started my smoking much later in the day than I normally would have. Dusk comes, and with it the mosquitos. I notice one on my arm, and bring my spare hand down upon her hard, flattening her, her grey limbs scattered within a smear of my own red essence. The carnage came too late, and within moments I can see the white bump raise and an intense itching starts, not just where she punctured me, but also in my other arm, on my ankle, my finger. I’m being eaten alive. I debate going inside to get some repellent, but the DEET would surely ruin what little is left of the cigar; it hardly seems worth it. When I’m done I’ll put a little square of sticky-tape on each bite, a trick I discovered years ago that at least stops me scratching them, but seems to somehow stop the itching as well. What a boon it would be if cigar smoke deterred mosquitos.

The end is barely bitter; heavy chocolate and coffee. I eat a passionfruit that I’ve been saving for after because I was worried that the flavour would be too strong and overpower the cigar, but it can’t even make a dint in the rich tobacco ending.

Terrible burn, but when it works it works well. Better than a poorly constructed Monte 4.

Total touch ups: 3
Total relights: 4
Matches expended: 9
Lighters depleted: 1

Montecristo Robusto Edición Limitada 2000 on the Cuban Cigar Website

“Inconsistent” is the aficionado consensus on the C. There are a few very vocal maligners, there are a few staunch proponents, and in the middle there seems to be a general agreement that there were some good boxes and some bad; that at their best they were cocoa and cream, and at their worst they were bland and flavourless. One certainly can’t fault their pedigree: they shared the rolling bench with the legendary Cohiba Double Corona EL, which for my money are probably the best Edición Limitada and one of the best cigars ever to grace the virgin’s thigh (more on these later).

Cigars are best appreciated alone and best enjoyed with friends, so perhaps this afternoon – a glorious summers’ one that finds me drinking beers and talking shit with two old friends in my backyard – is not the best venue to tackle a controversial cigar like the C. The die, however, is cast: the cap is cut, Caesar has crossed the Rubicon, and smoke it I will.

(Historical Aside: I read once that alea iacta est, Caesar’s famous words upon crossing the aforementioned Italian waterway are a misquote, and should in fact read alea jacta esto; “throw the dice high” as opposed “the die is cast.” So it is, Monte C: you will burn today, but your flavours are by no means set in stone… wavering humidity… accompanying beverages… my own fickle moods… anything could happen. Let’s play.)

The draw is loose; not a total wind tunnel, but a long way from a Cuban draw, and there is a light, gusty breeze blowing also that will do it no favours. The first puffs are tannic and bitter, surprising for a cigar this age. I let it settle, hoping the bitterness is an artefact of the lighting and will pass, but it continues well beyond the first puffs. The only detectable flavour behind it is a sort of smooth, medium tobacco.

My friend Argus is smoking a Monte 3 with some age on it, and Stevespool, who “can’t handle a whole cigar” sits with us, occasionally sneaking a puff from one or the other cigar as it sits in the ashtray. After one such pull on the C I ask his opinion. “It tastes like a cheap cigar,” he observes. I somewhat concur. There is definitely none of the stink of Nicaragua in this cigar, but the sentiment is correct. It is not especially pleasant.

We suckle sweet Peroni in the sun, talking shit and telling ribald anecdotes. Argus is a historian by training, and laments the self-sabotaging nature of his industry, where there’s no private sector to speak of and jobs for academics are limited to a fraction of the students studying under them, so by definition most graduates will be unemployed. Oscar Pistorius is in the news, and conversation about him quickly degenerates into jokes about robot killing machines.

With half remaining Stevespool takes another drag. “That’s got a lot better,” he observes “with kind of an interesting aftertaste.” When pushed for a taste he eventually lands on “fluffy tires… like fairy floss made from rubber… it’s not offensive, but just sort of an airy tingle.” He giggles. I’m not sure I see the sweetness myself. The rubber is certainly there. Of the two he prefers the Monte 3.

We wander across hopes and dreams and money making capers. We’re all at an age where things are getting serious: Argus has a child on the way, Stevespool a wedding, I am dabbling in home ownership, and for us now is the time when schemes must be enacted. If we want to be drinking our own single-malt at our son’s 21st birthdays, we really have to consider putting it under oak immediately. Stevespool has a chemistry degree somewhere in his shady past, and we interrogate him as to the possibilities for creating a chemically perfect scotch not with centuries of tradition but with science. He isn’t very helpful, although he does offer quite a few insights into how alcohol alters brain chemistry.

The afternoon is turning to evening and we order a pizza. I’m a little drunk, but just afternoon drunk; even priests are drunk on Sunday afternoons.

One or two brief moments aside the Monte C has tasted plain and bitter, with perhaps a little straw and medium tobacco detectable somewhere in the aftertaste. If this is cocoa then it’s unsweetened cocoa powder eaten straight from the tin. Bitterness in cigars is usually a fault I assign to the smoker; he is smoking too fast, the cigar is burning too hot, scorching the smoke. In this instance, however, I don’t think this is the case. For one, the C has lasted a good 30 minutes longer than Argus’ comparably sized Monte 3, and for two, this thing has been so bitter that I’ve found myself instinctively giving it a lot of space between drags.

I let it go a few puffs sooner that I otherwise would. The pizza is here. Perhaps if I had smoked this cigar alone I might have been able to appreciate it, but as it stands, whilst I enjoyed this pleasant afternoon with my friends, I would have enjoyed it more so with a Monte 4.

Montecristo C Edición Limitada 2003 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Honestly, I remember nothing about this cigar. I was on the scene when they were released and I’ve had them before, but I don’t remember the reviews, I don’t remember the consensus, and I don’t remember any tasting notes. I remember the C, that controversial little cracker, and I remember the Robustos, and of course the more recent entries, the Sublime and the Grand Edmundo but the D? Nothing.

It’s a beautiful size, a elegant Lonsdale, with a nice wrapper, dark and oily. It has punch right from the start. Strong coffee and cream, with a real espresso hit on the back. Beautiful.

I’m drinking a Coca-Cola with it. At one point in my life I lived in China, and in Shanghai’s cigar lounges by far the most common accompaniment to a fine cigar is an icy glass of Diet Coke. Many Chinese have an allergy to alcohol, strong liquor especially, and that excludes them from the whiskey and rum cults we find in western cigar lounges. Outside the lounges they drink a lot of tea, but I’ve never seen it inside one. Perhaps it doesn’t have a strong enough flavour to complement the cigar. In any case, I asked a Chinese friend about it once and he told me that they drank Coke to “cut some of the bitterness.” I’ve drunken it with my own cigars on many occasions, and he’s right, it does remove a lot of the tar and compliments a cigar quite nicely. If it has a fault it’s that it is perhaps a bit too cloying, drowning the tastebuds a little, and were I compiling a definitive tasting notes guide I would probably avoid it, but for a casual smoke I think it works. I will also add the proviso that it should also be watered down with ice, and please, Coke only, no Pepsi. Pepsi is sweeter than Coke and doesn’t have the same complexity; in Coke if you concentrate you can taste the three citrus flavours – lemon, lime, and orange – as well as cinnamon, vanilla and whatever the secret ingredient is. I also have my reservations about Coke in America, which uses high-fructose corn syrup rather than the sugar we have in the rest of the world. I understand you can get proper Coke with sugar around Easter, Americans: it’s called “kosher for Passover” or something like that. Maybe one of those froufrou high end natural colas would work as well. I’ll have to try it.

It’s a wonderful day, blue skys, high twenties, but the wind is a little squally and I think it’s stoking the cigar a bit, because at a little over halfway an ashy, bitter taste begins to creep in, a sure sign that the cigar is burning too hot. Once I let the flavour fade on my tongue I’m left with a medium tobacco flavour, some hint of bean. Perhaps the Coke is ruining this cigar: it began so well, but is getting worse as it goes on. From the first puff this was shaping up to be a magnificent cigar, those full lashings of coffee has me convinced that into the second half I would be in a world of chocolate and sweet spice, but instead I just have bitterness over a little tobacco.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, this is still obviously a cigar of the highest quality, burn has been impeccable, and you can taste the obvious quality in the leaf – I’ll take the Pepsi challenge with this and a non-Cuban any day of the week – but it just disappoints a bit when compared to my high expectations.

By the end of these reviews I’m usually a little tipsy, and I wonder if my enjoyment of the cigar is coloured by insobriety; my best self is the one with two to four standard drinks inside him. No, that can’t be it; I had that first Monte 4 cold sober and that was a cracker. As I toss the nub of this cigar, I observe that I have no buzz at all from the nicotine, and, in fact, I kind of want another cigar. Something short and punchy like a Cohiba Panatela. I wonder if I have any left.

The Montecristo D: begins well, ends less so. Perhaps it’s in a sick period.

Montecristo D Edición Limitada 2005 on the Cuban Cigar Website.

It’s 11am and I’ve just fixed myself a nice rum and ginger beer. I’m lying on a banana lounge in the lee of the house at the Groom compound, and have positioned myself so that the sun falls over exactly half my bare torso. I have done this because yesterday I smoked a cigar on the other side of the house about this time, and as a result one half of my body is quite pink, while the other remains its usual fish belly white. I’m trying to even out the pink.

Such is the life of the cigar aficionado; it’s not all high quality smokes and rum drinks in the sun, you know. Well, okay, that is all it is, but sometimes you get sunburned.

I estimate that in about an hour and a half the sun will have moved in the sky and my chest will be entirely in the shade, and so I have looked through my travel humidor to find the cigar that would most closely match that smoking time, and settled on this, the Montecristo Grand Edmundo. Also my harridan mother is expected to show up at 2:00, and I’d like to be done by then.

This is the seventh Montecristo to wear the EL band, and one of the best received, and as of this writing it is still available at a somewhat reasonable price if one sets one’s mind to it.

I light it, and it opens like a lily to the light; a rich, powerful cream, the froth from a cappuccino with a dusting of nutmeg. Wonderful.

It’s an ugly looking stick. There is a split part way down the side which is very probably my fault, but there is also a smear of what looks like glue about halfway down (probably Habanos’ fault, although I suppose it’s plausible that one of the middlemen whose hands it passed through before mind did it), and a discolouration in the wrapper near the end (definitely Habanos). I can’t say I mind: the cigar is perfectly constructed and smoking wonderfully; these blemishes are maker’s marks, testament to the hand wrought nature of the Cuban cigar.

The ash is a nice pale colour, matching with some exactness the weathered boards of my deck. I let it keep it a while, and it holds strong, the mark of good construction.

The eye of heaven has moved, and now only my arm is in his light. I inspect it, and it glistens slightly, moisture present between the hairs. Is that sweat, I wonder, or my jus, leaking out of me like it leaks out of a roasted chicken. I question for a moment the logic of this decision. I’m used to laughing in the face of mouth cancer, but is it sensible to bait melanoma as well?

The cigar is great, wonderfully rich, with sweet vanilla bean and cream dominating. I’m a sucker for an EL. A lot of aficionados don’t like them, and their criticisms – that they all taste kind of the same, that they cost too much, that the sizes are unimaginative, and that it’s a shame they have to come at a cost of so many discontinuations – are all perfectly valid, however, that EL flavour, that richness, the sweetness and notes of coffee and chocolate, I just love it.

The wind has shifted. Previously it was a hot wind, blowing from the landward side, and I was sheltered from it on this side of the house, but now it blows from behind me, from the ocean. It’s cool, and provides a nice relief for my roasted flesh, however, it is no longer possible to leave my cigar perched on the rim of my dark and stormy; now I must shelter it with my body, lest the wind steal my puffs, and set it to burning too hot. Sometimes to hot doth the cigar of Cuba burn.

Twelve forty five, and I wanderest entirely in the shade. I move my lounger over a little to catch the last of it. No sense in half measures.

Every fair from fair must sometime decline, and in the last inch the cigar shows its tar and nicotine. It’s not unpleasant, and what remains of the rum and ginger cuts it nicely. I like a little sweetness against a cigar, it offsets the bitterness, and especially at the end it… well, it cuts it nicely. Ginger too. Little tip when making cocktails: add a little ginger syrup to anything remotely fruity, and the reaction you get will inevitably be “mmm! That’s amazing! What is that?” Goes a lot way toward disguising a triple shot of gin, and even further to hiding a large amount of cheap rum.

I’m burning my fingers, a state I cannot brook, what with all the other burns that my body is enduring, and so this cigar must meet its maker; over the rail it goes, down, down, to the sandy soil.

Truly a delightful cigar, and by far the better of the Sublime I smoked recently. Perhaps not quite the equal of the possible Edmundo Dantes, but that speaks more to the quality of that cigar than any inadequacy in this one. Grab a box if you can.

Montecristo Grand Edmundo Edición Limitada 2010 on the Cuban Cigar Website.

A handsome brute with lovely milk chocolate wrapper. A summer evening down at the Groom Compound, a pastoral holding in rural Victoria that has been in my family for several generations. I am about to enjoy this cigar with a friend and colleague. We’ll sit on the upper deck, looking out over the trees toward the ocean where in the distance the green lights of the shipping channel markers flash quietly to themselves. Flash, flash, flash, flash, pause. Flash, flash, flash, flash, pause.

Also visible in this picture: Ernest Hemmingway’s Green Hills of Africa (a cigar aficionado who reads Hemmingway? How unusual), a 10 count travel humidor I got free with a box of Cohiba Piramides EL 2005 (more on those later), the keys to the Groom Compound, resplendent on their fake Ralph Lauren Polo key-ring, and the Nokia 6300 (the be all and end all of mobile telephony). Not sure what the cord is from. The wine is a 2007 French cleanskin. I always find the more mild French wines very enjoyable after the brutish Australian reds that make up most of my intake. Just a nice, ripe, refreshing fruit on the pallet.

We head out to the deck and turn off the lights in the house so as to better appreciate the full sky of stars so alien to city boys like us. There will be very few photos. I try a few times, but it is just too dark, and the flash looks horrid.

I pluck the cap of the cigar with my nail, and give the cigar an experimental puff. Draw a little loose, is my first thought. It also occurs to me the second the thing touches my lips that 54 is just too thick. The Cohiba Sublime in 2004 was the first Cuban parejo to breach 52, following the Nicaraguans on their quest for higher and higher ring gauges, and since then there have to have been ten or twenty more. ELs, REs, lord knows those book Humidors seem to find room for another few points of ring gauge every year. It makes no sense to me. It’s just too big! It’s not comfortable in the mouth! Who enjoys these things? What possible advantage is there to them?

The first flavour that jumps out of this cigar is wet earth. If I had to be specific, I would say that it is the smell of the sandy soil of a peninsula when the rains are coming in downwind. It hasn’t rained in a week or so, but it’s been hot and blowy and the air is full of dust. The rains are working their way toward you, a kilometre or so off, and the air is carrying the scent of that freshly wet sandy soil to you in advance.

I remember when I first bought these cigars… not these examples, but others like them. It was February 2009, and I had a meeting in Brisbane early in the morning. By 11am I was done, deposited in the Brisbane CBD, a city I had visited only briefly once before, and some decades previous. I was spending the night with a friend, but she was working, and I wasn’t scheduled to meet her till 5pm. It was hot and sticky in Brisbane, as it often is, and I was uncomfortable in my woollen suit. I had a pie with mushy peas, a delicacy not often found in Melbourne, and admired the long tan legs that sat below the short shorts of the Queensland girls.

There was a cigar shop I’d dealt with online from time to time in Brisbane, and I thought to myself that perhaps I’d visit it, put a face to the name on my shipping label, and then find somewhere shaded to enjoy a long smoke while I waited for my friend. 2009 was well into the era of the ubiquitous smartphone, but I was still using a Nokia 6300 (although, much like the Sublimes this rambling anecdote is nominally about, it was a different example of the breed than the one pictured above), and so I phoned a friend who I thought would be sitting in front of a computer, and asked him to look up the address of the cigar store and give me directions from my current location.

It was not too far away, five kilometres or so, but I got lost several times (necessitating further phone calls), and the way was very hilly, so when I arrived at the store (more a mail order operation than an elaborate divan), in a suburban terrace house I was out of breath and absolutely soaked through with sweat. Nonetheless, I was ushered into the cool of the walk in humidor (after a moist and reluctant handshake), where I selected a then newly released cigar that was all the buzz of the moment, the Montecristo Sublime Edición Limitada 2008.

I found a café with an air-conditioned terrace down but the river, and enjoyed the cigar immensely. I later bought a box.

Three inches in the dusty wet earth has disappeared, and the classic richness of an EL is starting to come through. Full bodied premium tobacco. A hint of spice. A little salt. Slight bitterness. Could be burning too hot, it’s hard to shield the cigars from the sea breeze that is blowing in. My colleague says he tastes Chocolate, “that bitter 95% cocoa stuff,” but I don’t taste it. It is lovely though. An excellent cigar.

He disappears into the house, and comes back a few minutes later with toast, half a slice buttered and half with a little Dijon mustard. They both complement the cigar wonderfully. The Dijon is a revelation.

It gets bitter toward the end as you’d expect; a 54 ring is a lot of tar. I pinch the nub to suck out the last of the smoke, right to my fingertips. Perhaps that’s the point of 54 – they make good nubs. I flick the butt into the trees. A noble end to a first class smoke.

Better than a Monte 4.

Montecristo Sublimes Edición Limitada 2008 on the Cuban Cigar Website.