Brun Del Rè Cigars, a La Palina Cigar and a Little Rant

I was feeling adventurous again this week and reached for a Brun Del Rè Premium Robusto from last year’s IPCPR.  I had smoked a sample from their Don Corazza line a while ago and wasn’t very impressed.  I fell victim to one of  the classic blunders – The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”  but only slightly less well-known is this: “Never judge a cigar line based upon a single sample”. Based upon that one sample, I had been hesitant to invest my valuable cigar time in what might have been just another ho-hum, run of the mill trade show sample.   However, my faith has been restored with this cigar.  It was a beautiful Ecuador Connecticut shade wrapped 5″ x 50 robusto stuffed with Nicaraguan filer and made in Costa Rica .  It was well made, had a nice sweet flavor and was on the medium end of mild.  I’m very much looking forward to sampling the rest of this line and even re-visiting the Don Corazza.  This cigar is worth a try in my opinion.

Took a long walk on Friday evening and needed a little heftier cigar, so I selected a recently received La Palina Toro.  If I get a mile and a half from home and realize I’ve got a dud cigar I’m very unhappy, so cigar selection in this case is critical.  Of course, I have the foresight to carry a back-up, either to smoke if I get a less than satisfying cigar experience, or to share along the way if the need arises.  With the La Palina, I know I won’t need the back-up. These cigars are always perfectly constructed, they are made in the Raices Cubanas factory in Honduras, the same factory that produces such excellent and consistent lines as Alec Bradley and Illusione (the later of which I’ve never had, but heard good things!).  The La Palina Toro is a rich and tasty smoke, although still pricey at $10 each.  It’s a premium smoke that has never failed to deliver in all of the sizes I’ve tried, but I think I like this size and the robusto the best. Thank you to La Palina for providing the samples, and for their support of this site.

A Little Rant

This is probably the wrong time to type this. I tend to be the most curmudgeonly on Sunday mornings after I’ve worked at my part time job until 3 am, but I feel the need to vent.  A couple things annoy me when reading/listening to my contemporaries in what I’ll hesitantly call the cigar media.  My first beef involves basic writing skills.  My dear friend Barry Stein made a bit of a joke about his typos, and it annoyed me but I get it.  He had a wildly successful site, did a great job, and it was a bit of an inside joke.  I read other sites (and I’m going to be a wuss and not name names) and I’m appalled.  I’m no writer, but I take what I do here pretty seriously and try to present readable content.  Punctuation, run on sentences, misspelling, I feel like I’m reading something a 5th grader wrote (with apologies to most 5th graders).  Seriously, word processor programs will at least tell you most of this stuff is wrong!  I don’t know how people can put their names on some of the stuff I see.  It’s a blog. It’s not twitter or texting. Please write coherently.  Another thing that rankles me is when I’m listening to a podcast, and I listen to a bunch, and the presenters get basic information wrong.  I’m far from an expert, but after more than a decade and a half of being a crazy cigar fool, I think I can pretty much tell a cigars size on sight, or at least come close.  I also think it’s irresponsible to get the price-point wrong about a cigar, especially to represent it as a much cheaper cigar than it actually is.  Really, as much time as it must take to produce such high quality podcasts, and as readily available as the information is in most cases, I think it sloppy to leave out these little details.  People must think I’m nuts when I’m in the car or out for a walk and start talking back to the podcast trying to correct them!  Anyway, it all comes down to details in both cases. If you don’t have the details, don’t make them up or guess while presenting yourself as an authority.  As I said, I neither think myself an authority, nor any kind of writer, but I try to get the details right as I feel it’s my responsibility. Thanks for listening, and please leave a comment if there’s something I do repeatedly that annoys you.

Sometime during the week I smoked a Berger and Argenti Mooch Schnorr that was really good.  I love the size of this cigar, (it’s  5″ x 50 but it seems more like a corona gorda for some reason) and the name always makes me smile as much as the excellent flavor and construction.  This is a reasonably priced, medium bodied cigar that I think can be enjoyed by many different types of smokers.  In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned this cigar as I’ve mentioned it before, but I spent a lot of time on the photo of the cigar and didn’t want it to go to waste :-).

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

CigarCraig