Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial

The Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial made its first appearance in 2004 as an Edition Limitada, where it proved so popular that they made it a regular production four years later. It was ahead of its time; the third example of the Gorditos vitola, a size which has appeared in the “new releases” column of the Habanos catalogue fifteen times since, and continues to resurface on an annual basis. I wondered at the time why they called it the Epicure Especial, and not the Epicure No. 3, which seemed to me a more logical name for a cigar that was basically a longer Epicure No. 2. Whatever their reasoning was I guess it worked for them, as they have continued the trend with the Double Epicure, the Grand Epicure, and the Epicure de Luxe.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial unlit

I light her up. Construction is not great, with a wind tunnel draw that makes the initial burn far too hot, the smoke bitter as a result. Hopefully it will clean up as things stabilize. What flavor notes there are are woody and slightly chemical. Treated pine.

I met Saskiri Sutrisno online. Her profile was vague. She liked some TV shows. She liked to travel. Her pictures, all close-ups with big sunglasses, gave little indication of how she looked. She was enthusiastic, though, when she reached out to me and gushed about the bombastic essay that I used to promote my own eligibility. Enthusiasm goes a long way. It was a clear case for a low stakes internet date.

We met on a Tuesday night outside the State Library, because it’s a public place that everybody knows and because there’s nothing to do there. If you hate each other from the first moment then you’re not even committed to finishing your coffee. It was a Tuesday because nobody has anything better to do on a Tuesday.

We went to a nearby bar and immediately hit it off. She had been raised a diplo-brat, the child of a big wheel in the Indonesian kleptocracy of the 1980s and 90s, and we swapped stories about our childhoods in diplomatic enclaves. She laughed and smiled, with a big, wet mouth, and eyes to match. I liked her summer dress.

After the bar the date carried on to a restaurant, where the casual touching started; the clasp of the hand on the table to emphasize a point, the faux sympathetic shoulder pat. On the way to the third bar I held her hand. “Good move,” she whispered.

By the time the third bar closed it was a quarter passed midnight and we were two martinis passed sensible. We necked heavily in an alleyway.

Through the fog of Wednesday morning, I related the story to a friend. “I think this could be the one,” I told him. “She’s funny and smart and beautiful. She’s got Indonesian gangster money. Relax and Rolex.”

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial two thirds remain.

True to expectation, the cigar has mellowed off considerably. There are notes of straw and cedar, with light dry earth and dust. There is a vague peanut flavor in the late taste. Some salt.

For the most part, my affair with Saskiri was a lot of fun. She worked in finance at one of those jobs where everyone is young and bubbly and drinks late every night. She fell for that old routine, the one where I throw on a robe and casually put together cocktails in my grand apartment. She lived in the hipster area, and we had nice breakfasts and sneered cynically at everything. She had a fun set of nicknames: Sass, Sassafrass, Sasquatch, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Once, she crashed one of my work functions just as it was winding down, and smiled and laughed and enthralled the older guys. “Who was that girl?” my boss asked me the next morning. “An old friend?”
“Ah…no” I replied. “More of a new friend.”

I wasn’t wrong about the gangster money, either. She showed me pictures of herself at age four, being bounced on Suharto’s knee. Then came the family portrait: ten Sutrisnos and twenty staff, all in their Sunday best outside an ambassadorial residence. The women and girls wore matching white dresses. The men and boys were in suits and brandished AK-47s.

But then, there were the problems.

Most of them were minor. She snored like a rhinoceros. She had terrible taste in movies. She was always on her phone. And, of course, that old complaint started to surface; the one that has driven most every lover from my life. She liked me, and she needed to express that to me, and to hear it expressed in return. The needier she got the less my broken psychology wanted to validated her.

The final straw came on July 1. It was a Wednesday, and she was celebrating Canada Day at a bar near my house. She texted me repeatedly, asking me to join her. When I finally arrived she was drunk, and slurring her words, and going on and on about how she couldn’t believe two of her friends had hooked up. It wasn’t the event for me, and inside an hour I was ready to go. When I told her so, and a twenty-minute song-and-dance ensued about whether or not she would come to my house. Her complex iterations of logistics are lost on me even today, but basically, I felt that as we both had busy days the next day, the dominant strategy would be for her to come and be intimate for an hour or so, and then get a cab home; she was steadfast that she was only coming to my house if she could stay the night.

She fell asleep immediately post-coitus, stealing all the blanket and snoring at the volume of industrial machinery. Several times I tried to wake her, or roll her over, or to smother her, but it was all in vain, and by 3am I abandoned my bed and went to sleep in the spare room. There I slept soundly until five, when she shook me awake. “What are you doing in here?” she asked. “Was I snoring?” I moaned concurrence. “Oh my god,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She climbed into bed with me, the spare room’s single considerably less accommodating than my king, and fell asleep at once, immediately resuming her cacophony.

I was curt with her in the morning. She was sheepish, and knew she was in trouble. Once she’d gone I went upstairs to make the beds, and discovered that both sheets were heavily bloodstained. She had a cut on her leg, that apparently had opened up.

It was the final straw, and when she sheepishly texted me three days later, I let her know that it was over. She didn’t reply, but a few hours later I noticed she’d unfriended me on Facebook.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial, burnt just above the band.

The Epicure Especial ends a little spicy, with a sharp tar that is not altogether unpleasant. There is still some dry dirt in the aftertaste. A few weeks ago, a friend, having read the first few of this season’s Dusky Beauties observed to me that Hoyo might be a bit mild for my taste. I’m sorry to say it, but I think he might be right. Hopefully there is some gold deeper in the limiteds, because as far as the regular production goes, it all seems to be much of the same.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial nub.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial on the Cuban Cigar Website

Hoyo de Monterrey Elegantes La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2016

In The Harem, where cigars are rarely combusted before their fifth birthdays, and often not before their fifteenth, today’s beauty is a comparative rarity; the Hoyo de Monterrey Elegantes is part of the La Casa del Habano exclusive program, and was scheduled for release in 2016. Naturally, it did not actually begin appearing in stores until 2017, and the single I purchased at retail wasn’t even from the first batch. From factory to fire in less than six months! Unheard of.

Hoyo de Monterrey Elegantes La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2016 unlit

True to its name, it’s an elegant cigar, topping out at 47 ring gauge, but feeling thinner on account of the perfecto format. The wrapper is smooth chestnut. Whoever put the band on had a little trouble with the tapered tip: the fit is awkward, and you can clearly see the overlap. Lit, the cigar is punchy from the get go: bitter, and acridly herbal, with strong tannic and woody notes. Somewhere in there is something slightly fungal. Shitake mushrooms.

Being the height of Melbourne’s summer, the weather has taken a turn. The sky is overcast, and a chill breeze is coming in from the south. My winter coats are deep in the mothballs, and going in after them this early in the year would seem too much like giving up. My autumnal coat though? Seemed doable. It’s a very simple, Loden-wool chesterfield, cut to the mid-thigh. It first came into my possession in the mid-90s, when I was about 14, and going through a phase. A phase where I wanted a trench-coat.

I wanted it long and black and preferably leather. I wanted a collar I could flip up as high as my ears. I wanted to drop a caustic one-liner, flick my cigarette into the wind, and swoosh off into the night. The Matrix hadn’t come out yet, so I guess I must have seen The Crow or something. I suggested to my parents that they could buy me one for my birthday, and they flatly refused. That Sunday, at dinner at my grandparents’ house, my mother even brought it up as a joke. “Do you know what Alexander wants for his birthday?” She hooted. “A trench-coat!” My grandmother’s eyes lit up immediately. “I’ve got just the thing!”

She scurried to the back bedroom, and pulled my coat from the cupboard. “I hate this horrible thing” she declared. My grandfather glared, but said nothing. My mother gushed over the quality, which is very fine, and I accepted it somewhat begrudgingly. It was not at all what I wanted; a plain, old-man’s autumnal coat. I wasn’t nearly long or leather enough. On the ride home I mused out loud about the possibility of dying it back. “Oh, you mustn’t,” my mother said. “You’ll ruin it.”

Hoyo de Monterrey Elegantes La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2016, with two thirds remaining

After the bulge has burned away, the cigar grows mild, with cedar notes predominating. A straw taste has emerged, and there is still that slight musty element of forest floor. The burn is perfect.

My grandmother’s demise was fairly swift, as far as demises go. She was eighty-nine, and a routine doctor’s visit showed a lump on her liver. A biopsy declared it cancerous and rapidly spreading. She was sent more or less immediately to hospital, and after two weeks as an inpatient she was transferred to a hospice, where a few days later she would die.

The last time I saw her was in the hospital. It was the only occasion in my adult life that I ever remember being alone with her, and the only time I ever conversed with her person-to-person, as equals. She was taking a medication that was making her hallucinate, especially at night, and I discussed the experience at length with her, trying to give her some insight from my own misspent youth, when I had been through the same thing recreationally. Eventually the nurse came in, and it was time for me to go. As she was being bolstered up, my grandmother looked at me slyly and added one last thing in parting. “You know,” she said. “He’s never forgiven me for giving you that coat.”

At this point I had had the coat for fifteen years, and although my tastes had matured enough that I could appreciate it, I still wore it only rarely. There’s simply not that many days in a year that call for an autumnal coat. It had acquired a few knocks over the decades – it was missing a button, and the lining had come away in places – and I resolved to set things right. I would get it fixed up and return it to my grandfather.

Hoyo de Monterrey Elegantes La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2016, final third

Into the final third, the cigar as strengthened again. Still, the predominant note is cedar, and fresh cut branches. It’s slightly nutty. Walnuts.

After my grandmother died, my grandfather always seemed a bit lost. He lived until he was ninety-seven, and I think in the last few years more or less everyone he knew had died. He stayed in his own home, stubbornly independent, and pottered around, working on little projects and watching a lot of old TV. My grandmother had always done the cooking and the cleaning and so on, and he didn’t care much for those jobs, living on microwave dinners and letting the dishes pile up in the sink. He had to endure his daughters reversing the parental relationship, nagging him to eat better and clean up after himself, and bossing him around about his appointments and so on.

It took me about five years, but eventually I gave the coat back. I had it dry-cleaned and repaired, and it looked as good as the day I had acquired it. My parents were going over to my grandfather’s house for dinner, and I joined them, which was rare for me. I presented him the coat, and explained the story about my grandmother’s death bed. He claimed not to remember it, but nonetheless I felt like I had done the right thing. I had put something right that once was wrong.

It was almost exactly a week later that he died. My aunt was at his house, and was going to take him out for dinner. He was in the next room when she heard him fall. Mentally and physically he was fine, and in the family we had every expectation that he would reach a century, but in that one moment his heart just stopped beating. The paramedic said he would have been dead before he hit the floor.

A month later the family gather at the old house to divide up the estate, each of us placing stickers on the things we wanted. The coat was folded over the back of the dining chair, exactly where I’d left it. It got my first sticker.

Hoyo de Monterrey Elegantes La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2016 nub

The cigar gets a little bitter towards the end, but never too bad; it isn’t the bitter chocolate and heavy tobacco end that I relish, but nor is it the sharp, saliva inducing tar that finishes off inferior cigars. The Elegantes falls pretty squarely in type for Hoyo de Monterrey: it is light to medium strength, woody, with bit of grass and not too much else. If I had to rank it, and eventually I shall, it will probably find its place above the Epicure 2 and below the Regalos. It’s a narrow field though.

Hoyo de Monterrey Elegantes La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2016 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Hoyo de Monterrey Regalos Edición Limitada 2007

It is the morning after the night before, and the well-trodden path has taken me to a shady nook in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens. It seemed very implausible to me that smoking would be allowed here, and certainly nobody else seems to be doing it, but on careful study of the rules board I found no prohibition. The sky is a flawless blue. A gentle tropical breeze takes the edge off the Australian sun. On the river, boats silently putter back and forth, and on the boardwalk girls stroll languidly by, tan legs flashing beneath summer dresses. One cannot imagine a better situation for a cigar smoker to find himself in.

Hoyo de Monterrey Regalos Edición Limitada 2007 unlit, resting on some RayBan Caravans.

The Hoyo de Monterrey Regalos is one of the 2007 Edición Limitadas, and as far as I recall it’s considered largely forgettable, or at least, people largely have forgotten it. I haven’t seen a review of one of these in five years or more, and the ones when it came out weren’t glowing. Still, time changes cigars. It may have come into its own. Ignited, the opening of the cigar has a sharp bite, with musty, fungal undertones, and a good amount of dry straw. There is a bitterness there that I strongly suspect will become cocoa before too long. The tobacco strength is on the higher end of medium.

The reason for my trip for Brisbane – the aforementioned night before – was the Havanathon; a bi-annual bacchanal hosted by a local cigar retailer. It takes place in the shed that doubles as his headquarters, and consists of about two hundred large men carousing as only large men can. Four cigars apiece are included with admission, as is a buffet lunch, all the beer you can stomach, some lightly mixed mojitos and heavily mixed sangria.

The whole thing has the atmosphere of an extended buck’s night: a testosterone fuelled carnival of masculinity. There were waitresses in sequined bikinis, and the throng ogled them unabashedly. One of the girls seemed to be enjoying herself, or at least she was enough of a professional to pretend, all smiles and banter as she handed out the beers. On her buttock there was a tattooed lipstick mark, and she giggled coquettishly as guys posed as if they had just planted it. The other girl was less pleased with her lot in life, plonking each bottle down with a sneer, and shooting a poison glare at anyone who talked to her with anything more than a drink order. “She’d be pretty if she wasn’t such a bitch” a colleague observed to me. “That’s what makes her pretty,” another rejoindered.

Hoyo de Monterrey Regalos Edición Limitada 2007, two thirds remaining.

About a third in, and the cigar has mellowed, yet still the mustiness predominates, with a strong hint of a closet in a ramshackle ‘70s beach house. I’m sipping a Bundaberg Ginger Beer (luckily, the 7-11 didn’t carry the rum), and its sweetness takes any harshness from the cigar very nicely.

As the afternoon wore on, the shed grew stifling, as much from the combusted phlogiston of a few hundred Habanos as from the tropical sun beating on its iron. Most of the attendees migrated out the front, where the breeze provided welcome respite from the heat, even as it striped us of our ability to sustain a coal.

Soon our host called us back inside, where a trio of salsa dancers had materialised, all high kicks and swivelling hips. After a few numbers they lead us in a dance lesson, the moves to which more resembled the Hokey Pokey than the serpentine writhing they had shown us a few moments before. It ended with a conga line through the shed and out into the street. Cigar smokers have their talents: each of these men can hold down a drink, tell a tall tale, and wax lyrical about the tannic sting on the back-palate, but dancers they are not.

The afternoon wore on in much the same fashion: ribald conversation with the brothers of the leaf, punctuated by musical acts. By 6:00pm, with the third cigar fully combusted, my head was spinning from the nicotine and I needed a break. The crowd was starting to thin a bit, with most of the locals heading home to their lives. The men who stayed were the ones from interstate: true degenerates, with nowhere better to be. I stayed outside for about an hour, holding my fourth cigar, but leaving it unlit. The evening air cleared my head. I ate a light dinner of cold meats leftover from lunch, and drank more than one glass of water.

Hoyo de Monterrey Regalos Edición Limitada 2007 with one third remaining.

Into the final stretch and the cigar is firmly in the mid-strength. There is a strong tannic sting on the back-palate. The fungal mustiness has given way to muddy earth tones. The forecast cocoa has failed to eventuate.

The conclusion to the evening, naturally, was the karaoke contest. In Melbourne today, karaoke is somewhat popular. The expanding Asian influence of the last few decades has opened the bars, and those have gradually permeated the broader Australian culture, to the point where most youths of bar-hopping age would have had cause to belt out a rendition of Don’t Stop Believing on at least a few occasions. This was not always so. Even in my own salad days, karaoke was confined to the rare Wednesday night at the pub. At the Havanathon, where I fell on the younger end of the age scale, the level of experience was not high, and volunteers were few and far between.

The MC filled in the blanks with Elvis numbers, and a friend who is in a band gave us some very passable versions of ‘80s pop-songs, but after that the roster started to run dry. Eventually the MC took to wandering through the hall, offering each person the microphone, and declaring “pussy” when they turned it down. When he offered it to me I lingered for a second, then accepted.

My own karaoke repertoire was honed not with Australian youths, but with Japanese barflies. They have a machine over there that gives you an estimate of the amount of kilocalories you expended during your track, the algorithm for which seems to be based mainly on how loud you sing and how much your voice cracks. It trained me into a one trick pony: I sing power ballads and pretend to cry. It is an act utterly unsuited for this room, but nonetheless, I performed it, belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart with all I had, my voice mellifluous after three and a half cigars. Occasionally through screwed up eyes I would glance out at the crowed, who watched, stony-faced, unsure of what to make of the performance art. “Are you okay?” someone asked me after. “Just passionate,” I told him.

By ten the host had had enough, and led the assembled in a rousing chorus of that most proud Australian anthem, Thunderstruck, before turning on the lights. The stragglers stacked the chairs and stole the lighters, and embraced one another warmly. “Till next time, brother.” “Next year in Havana.”

There was an after party, of course, and a fifth cigar, and then a sixth, and somewhere along the way I found some Port wine, and somewhere else some KFC Popcorn Chicken. By four AM I was in bed, the fourteen hours of heavy drinking just enough to drown out the nicotine and put me straight to sleep.

Hoyo de Monterrey Regalos Edición Limitada 2007 nub and bands.

The cigar ends nicely, never bitter, but still with the dry, musty note that has predominated throughout. In the end there is nothing wrong with the Regalos, but when I tell the story of this afternoon, the details I relate will be of the bush turkey scratching in the dirt at my feet, and how he puffed his chest, and then charged, head lowered, to drive off flock of Ibis who came too near; of the big lizard who emerged from the brush to sun himself on the road, and almost got clipped by a cyclist; and of the two Japanese girls, who strolled by languidly, wrinkling their noses at the smell of my cigar. The Regalos, alas, is ultimately forgettable. The Havanathon, not so much.

Hoyo de Monterrey Regalos Edición Limitada 2007 on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2

Your intrepid reporter is deep in the jungles of Northern Australia, where the white noise of the cicadas is loud enough to make conversation difficult. My hostel has the aspect of a safari lodge: the bar is a few roughhewn wooden benches under a great green tarpaulin, strung between three ancient trees. My fellow travellers all speak with different accents, none of them Australian.

The place bills itself as a ‘wilderness retreat.’ My room, some fifty meters away down a narrow path through the dense foliage, is a meagre hut, with flyscreen walls and a tarpaulin roof. There is no power after they shut the generator off at 10pm. We are several hours north of the nearest mobile phone coverage, and there is a sign by the bar that gently advises us not to bother enquiring about the WiFi: “The best connection you can make” it suggests, “is with each other.”

I feel like there is no better way to bond with my compatriots than by lighting up a cigar: after all, what could a bunch of eco-tourists possibly object to about a Cuban cigar, the most natural product on earth?

Like its thinner sister, the Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 is an ancient cigar, having survived since the revolution. Once upon a simpler time, these came in cabinets of 50, and wore no bands. Since 2008 they have two, giving this example less age than that. It is the oldest of the still extant robustos, an early forebear of the fat-cigar trend.

As an accompaniment, I order a glass of the highest shelf local spirit in the house: Bundaberg Black, neat. The bartender makes a show of carefully measuring out the shot. “You don’t want me to give you too much of this stuff, mate.”

He’s not wrong. Pure gasoline.

 Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 unlit, on a glass of Bundy Black.

Set ablaze, the cigar opens in a pleasant but inoffensive manner. The predominate flavour is mid-strength tobacco, tending towards mild. It is grassy, with strong notes of hay, accompanied by saddle leather and a hint of wet animal, to complete the barnyard melange.

I arrived in the jungle yesterday, and slept only fitfully: not only is there the constant cacophony of the cicadas, which only the mating calls of the bush turkeys and cassowaries can break through, but also every ten minutes a nut falls from the tree above my hut and lands on the tarpaulin like a gunshot. My wakeup-call this morning came in the form of a marsupial mouse, who crawled onto my pillow from places unknown. I was dozing when I felt his hot breath in my ear, and inquisitively rolled over to find us face to face. With a primal yawp I leapt out of bed, and he fled. Unable to locate either the point of the critter’s entry or of his exit, I decided the best strategy was to vacate the hut myself. On the porch I found a four-foot iguana, and I encouraged him inside to ferret out the rodent, but the slovenly lizard didn’t seem interested. 

By midday I found myself in the local swimming hole. Some kids were downstream of us, swinging off a rope, laughing, and cursing like sailors at their disobedient Blue Heeler, Gypsy. Eventually they left, with most of them roaring off in their beaten up four-wheel drive. One of their number, however, came towards us to collect his things – a towel and a short digeridoo – that lay on the river bank near where we were swimming.

He was a lanky teen, with a pile of red hair. His skin was parchment white; his pants would have been a similar tone, but had been rendered transparent by the water, making the chestnut thatch of his mons pubis distractingly visible. He hailed us from the shore with a ponderous drawl of the Australian bush philosopher.

      “Youse from around here?”

I told him I was from Melbourne, and he sighed.

      “I don’t like the city” he told us. “I’m from the Daintree, born and raised for nineteen years. I went to Sydney once. I thought the jungle had made me a man, but that city made me a little boy.”

My companion is from California, and she told him so, and he seemed to like that a little better. “Yeah, I reckon that’d be alright. I reckon California would be like the Daintree.”

I laughed, and told him that I’d been to both, and they were similar. “Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere a little different though? See the world?”

      “Why would I ever want to go anywhere else, when it’s so beautiful here?”

I asked about his digeridoo. “Oh, I love me dige,” he told us. “Can I play you a tune?”

The lad was good, conjuring from the dige at least as tonal a sound as I’ve ever heard from one, with a syncopated section reminiscent of an electronic dance track. For his finale he plunged the end of the stick into the water of the creek, slowly pushing it deeper and deeper, muffling the sound, but creating a maelstrom of bubbles around it. Finally, he withdrew it, gasping for air.

      “I do that to improve my lungs” he told us. “If I could play my full size dige when it was all the way in the water like that, I’d have the strongest lungs in Australia.” 

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2, two thirds remain. 

Just past the midway point the cigar starts to get bitter and ashy, but is somewhat redeemed by a very mild sweetness on the aftertaste. The flavours, in the rare place where anything definable penetrates the bitterness, are much unchanged: tobacco and dry grass. Some cedar.

Without warning the heavens open, a torrential downpour that pounds on the tarpaulin roof, competing with the white noise of the jungle. The low-point of the roof is nearby, forming a spout where the rain cascades off like a waterfall. A fast-flowing creek immediately forms on the ground beneath, disappearing off into the bush. Toads emerge, seemingly from nowhere, splashing about on the riverbank.

Within fifteen minutes it is over, and the air returns to its regular warm and humid state. The bush turkeys resume their cries.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2, smoked to just above the bands.

The final inch of the cigar reveals the life in the thing. The tobacco grows from medium toward strong. The sharp bitterness is gone, replaced by the richer, and much more pleasant bitterness of heavy tar, with nuttiness (peanuts), and some tropical fruit notes in the back of the thing.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 is not a terrible cigar by any means, but nor is there especially much too it. I’d take it before the Epicure No. 1, but it still runs a distant second to Partagás Serie D No. 4.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 nub.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1

The passage of time, my friends, is inevitable. Grains of sand, crushed from once mighty mountains, cannot help but fall through the neck of the hourglass; the quartz crystal inevitably resonates with precise frequency when an electrical current is supplied; and my own Omega Seamaster’s mainspring coils and uncoils with much the same rhythm today as it did when my grandfather first wore it in 1969. Eighteen months have passed since we last spoke. Battles have been won and lost. Loves have come and gone. And Dusky Beauties, has returned.

Hoyo de Monterrey is the least of the big five global brands, and it’s not one I have terribly much affection for. The name translates to “the Hole of Monterrey,” and refers to a valley in Cuba, once famous for its tobacco. They are generally mild cigars, with a bit of wood and grass. The single example to appear previously on The Harem was 2003’s Extravaganza, smoked as part of my Colección Habanos roundup. It came in a mediocre 7th out of 10.

For the quintessential, entry level Hoyo, to which I shall compare all the exotics, I have selected the Epicure No. 1. It’s a corona gorda, and is as popular as any Hoyo. Normally they wear a second band, but mine has lost hers, a tithe to the god of plain packaging.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 unlit and in the shadows.

I light it, and the early notes are of mid-strength, vaguely sour tobacco. Somewhere in there there is a slight note of something chemical. It doesn’t overwhelm: just a little hint of Cuaba coming through. The aftertaste is quite pleasant. Buttery.

December 6th 2016 began like most days. I woke up late, and had a leisurely shower. I did a few push-ups, and drank my nutrient slurry, and by mid-morning had wandered into the office, where I noticed that my email wasn’t working. This in itself was not entirely unusual. Since some time in the early 2000s I have run my own email server, and from time to time, things happen. Most usually, the hard disk on the server fills up, and manual intervention is needed to clear things out, but occasionally the hosting company goes down for maintenance or something along those lines. I tried to log into the server, but it wasn’t responding, so I went to the Hotmail account that I use when other emails fail to see if they had sent me a downtime notice or anything. There was an email there, and it was brief and to the point.

Dear Mr. Groom,

Earlier today the server hosting your VPS crashed, and the backup could not be recovered. It has been reset. You will be refunded for downtime (approximately 8 hours) on a prorata basis.

They provided a new username and password, and when I logged in it was as they had described. The server was as a new, virgin install. CubanCigarWebsite, with its 40 gigabytes of files, was erased, along with all 125,000 words of Dusky Beauties, my personal website, the website I had in high-school, the site where I posted my erotic fiction in the early 2000s, my cocktail recipe database, my Michael Jackson fan site, the website for my friend’s home portraiture business: all were gone. My four email servers, with 10 years of correspondence, both private and professional, erased. It amounted to the complete annihilation of my lifetime creative output.

Denial, as always, was my first response. Computer data is rarely ever completely lost. In the very worst case, if even a portion of a disk drive survives, it can be picked over by men in white coats with microscopes. There was no indication that the loss was caused by a fire at the data-centre, so most likely it could be recovered with considerably less effort than that. I fired off a help desk ticket: priority 1, urgent. It would be the first of many. Their reply was similar to their original email: apologetic but nonchalant, and absolutely clear that the data would not be coming back. I fired off an increasingly panicked response, but my hope was starting to fade. It felt like it was time to call Trevor.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 in the bright sun, a quarter smoked.

At the midpoint the cigar is light-to-mid strength, with dry straw alongside freshly cut lumbar. There is a bit of a herbal taste there that leaves a tang on the back of the tongue.

In 2008 I was a bare neophyte in the world of Cuban cigars, when I found myself in a blind tasting contest. I had no business being there, as my experience was far too narrow, and I knew that whatever I picked was going to be a guess, but I wanted to at least make it an educated guess. I headed to CubanCigarWebsite.com, which was then (as now), the best online reference for Cuban cigars. The site at that time was flat HTML. Each cigar appeared in several locations that would all have to be updated manually, and most importantly, it wasn’t searchable. If you had the approximate dimensions of a cigar, and wanted everything that fit within that, it just wasn’t possible.

And so I emailed Trevor, the proprietor, and suggested that he put a database behind the site. In not so many words he replied: “good idea. Why don’t you do it.”

And so I did.

For the next four years we worked on the site together, our relationship pretty similar to your standard consulting gig. Once in a while Trev would have an idea for a change, and I would implement it. Every now and again he’d send a few cigars my way. It was at least three years and 150,000 words of emails before we ever met in person.

Between 2012 and 2014 Trevor gradually retired to a quiet life of philately, and I took over the running of the thing. I have changed very little during my tenure, beyond keeping it up to date and adding the odd technical feature. The truth is that by the time of Trev’s retirement, the site was basically complete, and could remain forever as a legacy to his efforts. Cuban cigar smoking is not a field that has changed terribly much over the last 500 years. Every year some more special releases come out, and once every 20 years or so there is an event of historical significance, but other than that, there isn’t a lot of innovation: most of the time, you still light them at the foot and puff from head.

It was not an easy call to make. Once I’d passed on the news that everything was gone, and unlikely to be recovered, Trev and I tried to make small talk, but we were both too shaken up to think of anything to say. All in all the call lasted about three minutes.

Later that night I went to a concert with an old friend. When she asked me how my day was I told her that I’d lost everything I’d ever created in my life. She asked how I felt. “Empty.” I replied.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 final third.

Into the final third, and the cigar is much unchanged: grass and sap, with a woody element and the strongly tannic tang of tang of cheap sauv blanc. It is starting to get bitter, which does not bode at all well for the smoke to come.

Like most things, it all worked out in the end. After I circulated an impassioned essay about the situation to the cigar community, there were a great many offers of assistance. My donation link saw more use than it had for the entirety of its existence. Technical experts had recovery advice. Lawyers were willing to send letters to the hosting company.

Most importantly, several people came forward offering me complete (if slightly out of date) copies of the site they had made “so they could browse it locally.” It was suspicious, but it saved me. Between February and April, I rewrote the backend software of the site, and then built a bot to repopulate it from the copies. Dusky Beauties was restored a little later, largely from caching sites and my own archives. My email was all still on my computer, and I was smart enough to back it all up before it resynced with the new blank servers. Not everything was saved. My rants about the faculty at my high-school and clumsy erotica of my early 20s were lost to the dust of all things. But perhaps that is for the best.

The Epicure No. 1 ends better than expected, grassy and nutty, and with the bitterness lurking just out of the fore-palate, I never once feel the need to spit or take a sip of water. In the end, this is not an overly complex cigar, with no flavour ever really emerging that could overpower mid-tobacco and vague grassiness, and barely any change throughout its passage. I’d take a Monte 4 over this, and a PSD4, and even a Romeo Petit Coronas. Between this and the Upmann Petite Coronas there’s not a lot in it. Both are inoffensive but unremarkable. Pick whichever is closest.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 nub.

One final note: once removed, the band bears a size mark for a 50-52 ring cigar: curious on a 46-ring gage smoke. I guess they were out that day.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Hoyo de Monterrey Extravaganza Colección Habanos 2003

The third release of the Colección Habanos, 2003’s Hoyo de Monterrey Extravaganza is an odd looking brute; the wrapper changes shade significantly along the length of the wrapper leaf, which gives the cigar something of a barber-pole stripe pattern not unlike the one you see on exotic fakes from time to time. In true Cuban style the embossing on the band’s crest is appalling, which is to say that it is essentially not embossed, just a nondescript gold blob on a white background. The consensus seems to be that the name of this cigar is the Extravaganza, although there is some room for doubt, as the official Habanos web page for the release refers to it as the Lusitania, which was the name of a long departed HdM Nro. 109. Is this a recreation of that cigar? The sizes are the same, but are the blends? For me, the point is moot: the Lusitania was discontinued in the 1980s and I haven’t had the pleasure, and were I to acquire one now the age difference would spoil the comparison.

Hoyo de Monterrey Extravaganza Colección Habanos 2003 unlit

I set the cigar alight and lean back, closing my eyes and luxuriating in the pale autumn sunlight. The opening centimetre or so is pleasant, giving a very mild tobacco with strong grass and herbal notes, particularly in the aftertaste, which includes a sharp nasturtium tang. There’s quite a bit of wood, the sap from freshly split logs. It’s not entirely my thing, to be honest, but you can tell that this is a first class cigar, and I’m sure it would be right up the alley of someone with a slightly different palette to my own.

I’m pairing the Extravaganza with a bottle of muscat from 2007. I was poking around in the back of my wine cupboard this morning looking for some port to make a coffee cocktail, when my hand fell upon the muscat and I decided that today would be the day. It bears a label from the Cigar Society of Australia and New Zealand, with the subtitle “The Final Chapter: 28-June-2007.” The Cigar Society of Australia and New Zealand was a club run out of a cigar store in Melbourne that once upon a time would host an annual dinner in the ballroom at the Grand Hyatt, packing the place with a few hundred aficionados, and giving them a heavy meal and three cigars a piece. By desert the ballroom was filled with a fog so dense that visibility was reduced to just a few meters, and staggering aficionados would loom suddenly out of it like ships in the night. I acquired this muscat at the last of dinners, where the society held a mock funeral for their order, and cigar smoking in general. The president of the order was brought in in a casket; his burial presided over by a famously outspoken Catholic priest. Three days later smoking indoors was banned in Melbourne. I think the Cigar Society persisted for a few years with smaller events, just drinks on a rooftop patio some place, but it wasn’t the same. Nowadays their URL times out, and Google only returns ancient news articles. The cigar shop still exists, so perhaps the society is still around in some form, their internet presence toned down for an age where cigar smoking is an activity allowed only behind firmly closed doors.

Hoyo de Monterrey Extravaganza Colección Habanos 2003, half smoked on a glass of muscat

The muscat is pleasant enough, a simple fruity drink for a simple fruity man. With a strong plum flavour and a smack of honey in the aftertaste, it’s not overly complex, but is better than you’d expect from a free wine. The cloying sweetness on my palette is enough to knock off whatever sharp edge the Extravaganza was presenting (or perhaps it has mellowed of its own accord: the edge is gone at any rate), leaving a very nutty, barnyard sort of flavour, a simple, approachable cigar for the gentleman farmer to puff off as he casually surveys the fences on the back of an old, faithful work horse. His aging retriever follows a while, but eventually gives up and returns to the house to lie on the battered wicker loveseat on the porch.

That final cigar dinner fell on a Thursday night (I remember it because I wore a suit jacket to work that day in anticipation of it, and as soon as my boss saw me he pulled me into his office and demanded to know where I was interviewing: we were not normally a formal workplace). The smoking ban came into effect at midnight on Saturday night, which worked out well for everybody, one glorious last hurrah for the social smoker. Myself, three friends and four Montecristo Number 2s got ourselves prime position, a table right in the middle of the dance floor of a particularly fashionable young nightspot. It was a chilly night, as June nights in Melbourne are, but we were left more or less alone in our cloud of blue smoke, the bulk of the bar’s population of pretty young things choosing to shiver out on the semi-enclosed patio rather than enjoy the aroma of fine Cuban leaf. They’d walk past us to refresh their drinks, more than one giving a dirty look or sneering “that stinks.” At midnight we had a small ceremony and tossed our nubs into the ashtray, which the wait-staff promptly cleared, never to return. Like a ruptured dyke the pretty young things flowed indoors, filling the dance floor, and put off by the noise and constant jostling we smokers decamped to the now vacant patio, where we began the first evening of our never ending exile.

Hoyo de Monterrey Extravaganza Colección Habanos 2003, final third

In the final few inches the tang returns, along with a peaty taste and something not unlike a coffee factory burning down. It’s still very smokable to the last. The burn throughout has been perfect, with not a single touch up or relight. The Hoyo de Monterrey Extravaganza is not an amazing cigar, but it’s very pleasant on a mild day. The price of admission on these is well over $100, and it’s definitely not worth that, but if you can find one at an estate sale for $25, you shouldn’t hesitate for one moment.

Hoyo de Monterrey Extravaganza Colección Habanos 2003 nub

Hoyo de Monterrey Extravaganza Colección Habanos 2003 on the Cuban Cigar Website