Cigars So Far This Week: a La Palina, a Macanudo and Contest Winners!

Once again I’d like you to welcome a new sponsor, and an old friend, C-Gars, Ltd. The folks in the vast C-Gars Ltd empire are top notch when it comes to customer service. Check out their vast selection of cigars and accessories from around the world. I also heard from another old friend from the alt.smokers.cigars days who has revamped his site, The Cigar Diary. Tony’s site has some great information and a place to store and share your tasting notes. Thanks, Tony, for hunting me down after all these years!

A few weeks back I received a couple of La Palina El Diario Gordos in the mail from Courtney at La Palina. I had recently enjoyed the robusto in this line that was a sample from the IPCPR show, and was looking forward to trying other sizes. The Gordo is a 6″ x 58, which is a hefty cigar. I can’t figure out why I keep reaching for these enormous cigars lately. I love coronas and lanceros, and I always felt that 52 ring gauge was about as big as I’d care for, but all of these gorilla finger sized cigars are sneaking into my rotation! One thing I’ve noticed, and please tell me if you’ve noticed this too, but the last couple of 6 x 60s I’ve smoked (or close), seem to have….what’s the word I want?….clogged in the final 2 inches. It’s not like they are plugged suddenly, but hey seem to slow down a bit. Perhaps a year in the humidor would solve this. I’ve gotten away from the point, the La Palina is an exceptional cigar, really nice, sweet flavor and a perfect burn, even in this large size. It took me in excess of one and a half hours to smoke this one.

Tuesday evening I grabbed my last Macanudo 1968 robusto and really enjoyed it. I smoked one of these walking around Vegas in July, and I really like them. They have a bit of a unique flavor that I can’t pinpoint, but it’s good. The cold draw tasted like milk chocolate. As one would expect, the construction is perfect and it burned without need for correction. This is a solid cigar in my opinion, and one I would enjoy having in my humidor at all times. Certainly this is not a Macanudo that your typical Macanudo smoker is going to appreciate, it’s on the full side of medium from my perspective.

Contest!

Speaking of Macanudo, I need to pick a couple winners for the latest contest. I’ll be mailing out two Macanudo Millionaire 4 packs to the winners, provided they send me their contact info! The four-pack includes 60 Ring gauge versions of the Cafe, Maduro, 1968 and Crü Royale (again with the 60 ring!). I hope I win! OK, I’m kidding, I’m not eligible. For the first time, I added Twitter submissions for an additional entry and several people took advantage of that. I resorted to the tried and true method of selection: listing each entry as it comes in, numbering them, and using the random number generator to pick the winners. Boring, I know, but until I build a “wheel of fortune” out of dry erase board, this will have to do. So the random number generator produced the numbers 2 and 13, which by my records corresponds to a tweet from @TriumphCIO and a comment from Spidey55! Congrats to the two of you, please e-mail me your contact info so I can mail out your prizes! Once again, my gratitude to General Cigars for providing the prizes and for their support! I’m truly thankful for the relationship I’ve developed with them and the generous support they give to the cigar media community!