Dias de Gloria | CigarCraig's Blog

Tag Archives: Dias de Gloria

by Craig Vanderslice | June 30, 2024 · 10:31 am

E.P. Carrillo Sumatra, Dias de Gloria Brazil and Reinado Capablanca Cigars

It’s the end of June already, we’ve reached the halfway point of 2024! One of my favorite things about summer is that I can write my Sunday blog post on the porch with a cigar. This morning it’s a Macanudo Gold Label 2023, which is a 4½” x 60. I think my friends at Best Cigar Prices would call this a Robolo, they used to have a whole series of them! Anyway, that’s not what I was planning to talk about today! Last week I smoked the new E.P. Carrillo Maduro from their new Essence Series, This week I smoked the Sumatra. Lately I’ve been surprised at how many times the Maduro has come in second to another wrapper when I’ve sampled cigars in the same line with different wrappers, so I was half expecting this to happen again. The Sumatra I smoked is the Toro, a 6″ x 52 with an Ecuador Sumatra wrapper, binders from Nicaragua and Honduras, and fillers from Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. This was a really interesting cigar! It had a heavy, almost cloying, flavors of dark dried fruit, to me. It was mouth coating, like black licorice can be, with a pretty long finish. Where the Maduro brought back memories of the old La Gloria Cubana maduros, this was something new and different. I enjoyed it, although not as much as the Maduro, and look forward to seeing what other wrapper combinations they come out with in the future. This line is priced in the $10 range, so it should be a hit!

I stopped by a local shop on the way home Friday and grabbed a couple of the new A.J. Fernandez Dias de Gloria Brazil in a corona size. They call it a corona, it’s 6½” x 44, more of a lonsdale, really, which is why I picked a couple up. I’m not overly fond of smaller cigars. This has a Brazilian Mata Fina wrapper over Nicaraguan binder and fillers. It’s a nice, dark cigar, which started off with a bit if tanginess. It progressed to a savoriness with some sweet notes. I liked it very much. The price tag made me recall a few years back when they released the Ramon Allones at around $14 and we all thought that was a pricey A.J. Fernandez cigar. This Corona was $14. How times have quickly changed. Geat smoke though! Worth the price.

I go back about nearly a dozen years with Antonio Lam of Reinado Cigars. I think we first met at Cigar Emporium in Lyndhurst, NJ back in April of 2013. He sent me his newest project, the Capablanca. This cigar, like the rest of his recent work, is a tribute to his father. My first thought, looking at the name as a non-spanish speaker, I was expecting a shade wrapped cigar. It’s not, it has a Cameroon wrapper, over undisclosed filler and binder, and it’s made at an also undisclosed factory in the Dominican Republic. Capablanca refers to the Cuban chess master José Raúl Capablanca, who was the world chess champion in the 1920s. Antonio’s father would replay Capablanca’s chess games with his brother, and taught Antonio to play chess, often replaying the Capablanca games. Because of Antonio’s father suffering from dementia, a portion of all sales of Reinado cigars goes to the Dementia Society of America. The cigar is listed at 5½” x 54, but if felt more like 6″, but that might have been the inch of wrapper hangin over the foot. It also had a pigtail cap. I’ll admit that. I pulled a bit of the loose wrapper off pre-light because I’ve burned to many shirts, pants, rugs with flying burning debris! This is a really nice smoke. It has some nuttiness along with a pit of creaminess. It was medium bodied and burned well. It wasn’t overwhelmingly Cameroony, but that flavor was still there. I smoked it to a small nub while enjoying a movie on the porch with me family. I highly recommend anything from Reinado, this included.

I heard someone talking about what cut they prefer, and it got me thinking that I really don’t have a preference. I have three cutters sitting next to me, a Colibri V cutter, a CigarMedics Baller, and my Screwpop MagPulse straight cutter and I use them all depending on my whim. I have an Adorini Double Cigar Punch that I use (mostly the large end) when I absolutely need a Punch (flat capped cigars). I really am not that picky about what I use, as long as the cigar draws and doesn’t come apart. I have a variety of straight cutters which work fine, if I’m out and about it’s usually with a Xikar, due to the pocketability. Whatever works. Anyway, that’s all for today, until the next time,

CigarCraig

Comments Off on E.P. Carrillo Sumatra, Dias de Gloria Brazil and Reinado Capablanca Cigars

Filed under Review

Tagged as A.J. Fernandez, Brazil, Capablanca, cigar, cigars, Dias de Gloria, E.P. Carrillo, Essence, Reinado, Sumatra

by Craig Vanderslice | March 27, 2022 · 10:31 am

Divinus and Born To Be Wild Cigars from DAHOT, a Dias de Gloria and a Hawk

When I was at the TPE show and visited with Susana at Danli Honduras Tobacco (DAHOT), she gave me samples of two of their new offerings, the Divinus and the Born To Be Wild. I finally got around to smoking them this week. Unfortunately, I have no blend details on either cigar yet, when I get them I’ll edit them in, but until such a time I’ll fake my way through. I’ll start with the Divinus. This is a perfecto shaped cigar, 6″ long, like all of DAHOTs cigars, and maybe hitting 54 ging in the middle. I probably should have taken a measurement. I’m going to guess that the wrapper was some sort of Connecticut varietal grown in Honduras under shade, or a darker Ecuador Connecticut. It had that look and flavor. It was a nice smoke, medium bodied, quite well behaved for a large perfecto, but I rarely have issues with Danli Honduras Tobacco products. This cigar has “Tabacalera San Jeronimo” on the band, which answers a question I’ve had for a long time about the factory making this brands cigars. This is a factory which was associated with Kafie cigars, with which he’s no longer associated. I’ve never had any of Kafie’s cigars. He once blocked me on social media because I called him out for having his kids at a cigar rally. He justified it, but I pointed out, like I did in a recent rant, that it doesn’t matter what rational justification he might have, people against tobacco will use it against us. Remember, when it comes to the government and tobacco, rational thought goes out the window, tobacco is bad, nothing else matters. Anyway, This Divinus was a good cigar, maybe the first cigar from them that I didn’t really fall in love with.

I did, however, really like the Born To Be Wild cigar from DAHOT. I wish I had taken pictures of the box for this, it looks like a motorcycle piston. You can kind of see it in the video I did at the TPE show (HERE) where Susana talks about the cigar a little. Again, I don’t have blend info, but it’s a dark maduro, maybe San Andrés, maybe another Honduran varietal fermented to a maduro. It had a dark, meaty flavor, very savory, as opposed to sweet. It was really interesting and unusual, and I liked it very much. I’d love to have to make room for a box of these in my humidor! The company has several maduros in the portfolio, the Don Juan Calavera, the Marchetti, the Flor Maya, Caterina, even the Clown has a Maduro barber pole, all oare on the sweet side, but this one is so different. I desire more. I admit that I prefer more traditional branding, but the cigar is really good.

I walked in to Son’s Friday evening and encountered John Ciabocchi, our area’s A.J. Fernandez rep, who stopped in to do an impromptu Cut and Light event. This threw off what I had planned on smoking for the evening, but I’m adaptable, so I started off with a Dias de Gloria in the box pressed toro vitola. This is a Nicaraguan puro made with tobaccos from four of the company’s Esteli farms. I don’t believe I had smoked this cigar before, a mistake I don’t intend to repeat. This is a damned good smoke. The marketing on this says something about this representing the pre-castro days of cuban tobacco. Maybe? I don’t have a frame of reference, and I have a hard time with Abdel Fernandez, who might be 40?, having any notion what that tasted like then. It’s nice to dream about, but hardly verifiable. Can we agree that it’s a great tasting cigar? If you like a cigar with a good balance of rich tobacco and some sugarcane sweetness, give this a shot. It was a nice way to spend two hours, and it’s always nice seeing John again.

Last cigar: The Hawk from Blackbird Cigars. I hadn’t smoked this one before and figured I’d give it a try, even though I’m not a big fan of hawks. We’ve lost a couple of really nice chickens to hawks, right in front of our eyes, and it wasn’t pretty. We do our best to keep them out of our yard. They are neat and all, just not around our place! Hawk isn’t a regular production Blackbird line, but a special release with Adrian Acosta’s Cigar Culture. This cigar was a Gran Toro, 6″ x 56, box pressed, with a Brazilian Cubra wrapper, a San Andrés binder and Dominican and Nicaraguan fillers. This cigar falls into the woody/nutty spectrum for me, with some hints of sweetness and cocoa here and there. The two I smoked had some mendering burns, nothing that caused problems and couldn’t be easily corrected. Overall, enjoyable cigars, and I believe Son’s has some of these limide release cigars left. I like what Jonas does at Blackbird, and I do enjoy a lot of the cigars he makes.