A Tortuga, a Nica Rustica and a Pair of Casa Fernandez Cigars

I was just thinking how I really haven’t had a bad cigar, or even one I didn’t care for, in a very long time!  I hope I don’t jinx myself having said that.  I still have a bunch of IPCPR samples to get into, so all hope isn’t lost. 🙂

Saturday I was gifted a new size of the Tortuga 215 Reserva by Victor Vitale. This is a 5” x 48 cigar with a cedar sleeve and is yet to appear on retailers shelves. The Tortuga line is a limited edition, boutique line made in Honduras. In the past I’ve enjoyed the 215 Edition Limitada, and 1948 Connecticut, and my favorite, the 1950 Maduro, as well as a few of the new 215 Reserva which was released at the 2013 IPCPR show. The Cedro is a Nicaraguan puro that starts out with a delicious cedar flavor, no doubt a result of being wrapped in cedar! It’s a very savory, woody smoke with a little sweetness thrown in. I love the size. IF you can find these treat yourself to one.

Any time we have to change the clocks it causes a disturbance in The Force, but it’s hard to pick up on the first day. When the work week begins and you get a full appreciation of it being almost dark on the way home, it sinks in. I prefer not to smoke in the dark. I’m weird, but I get as much enjoyment out of watching my cigar burn as I do enjoying the flavor. It also makes it easier to know when you’re going to burn your fingers! Anyway, I needed a Monday sure thing, so I took a gamble on an IPCPR sample of the Drew Estate Nica Rustica  which shipped this week. I loved the pre-release sample I brought back from Nicaragua last May, it was something special. It seems that they removed the “wild” Esteli leaf from the production blend (ironic that this “jungle” leaf was used in the above mentioned Tortuga 1950 Maduro, or something very similar). The production Nica Rustica is still an excellent smoke. It’s rustic, but it burns arrow straight, and the flavor isn’t what I’d call refined, but it’s heavy and right up my alley. If the Undercrown is the poor man’s Liga Privada, then this is the poorer man’s Undercrown, and I’ll probably get in trouble for that comparison. At around $6 for a Toro if you like fuller bodied cigars you really can’t go wrong. This is a cigar I could smoke every day. Even without that special “wild” tobacco, it’s another winner. It even has a pigtail cap and a closed foot!

A couple weeks ago I received some samples from the folks at Casa Fernandez Cigars.  My experience with this line was previously limited to an Aganorsa Leaf Toro, which I loved, and a similar cigar with the secondary CRA bad which I didn’t love so much.  The cigars I received were both similar in size to the Tortuga Cedro, the Casa Fernandez Reserva Maduro Corona Extra 5” x 46 and the Aganorsa Leaf Maduro ‘Ilustre’ 5 x 48.  Once again, these are a perfect size for my evening walks now that the weather is colder and it’s dark early. Both cigars are made in the Miami factory, and both carry a retail price of $8.90.  I smoked the Reserva Maduro last night after a nice steak, and it shared the savor, meaty flavors and was a really nice cigar.  The performance was perfect, it burned well, it drew well and, as much as I like the size, I ended up wishing is was longer!  Same with the Ilustre.  This one has my favorite wrapper, the San Andrés, and it was reminiscent of strong, black coffee.  It also was constructed perfectly and also left me yearning for more.  Both fit the time I had allotted though, I hate it when I have a nice cigar that I can’t finish.  I certainly have smoked cigar that contained some of the Aganorsa leaf, and I will need to seek out some more of the Casa Fernandez lines to sample.  I’ll state publicly that I don’t care for their website, and I said that privately as well, and was assured that they are working on it.  Flash sites are impossible to link directly to various pages, and I couldn’t view it at all on my Android tablet.  I think more and more people are using devices that don’t work with Flash these days, and it doesn’t seem wise to alienate that large an audience.

I’d like to thank all of my readers and visitors.  Alexa is a site that tracks the relative popularity of websites around the world, and I’m pleased to see that I’ve broken the top one million websites worldwide, and have what I consider a pretty respectable ranking in the US.  So thanks for reading, and as your reward I will have a couple contests in December (regular readers will know that I’ve been having pretty terrific contests for the last couple Decembers!).  Stay tuned.

That’s all for now, until the next time,

CigarCraig