La Palina | CigarCraig's Blog

Tag Archives: La Palina

by CigarCraig | September 14, 2011 · 8:29 pm

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!

That’s it! Time to take a cigar for a walk before it rains!

Until, the next time,

CigarCraig

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Filed under Contest, Review

Tagged as c-gars ltd, cigar, Cigar Diary, cigars, Contest, El Diario, general, general cigars, IPCPR, La Palina, macanudo, Macanudo Millionaire

by CigarCraig | August 21, 2011 · 12:27 pm

Delaware Cigar Festival, La Palina, Art Deco and Hammer + Sickle

The fifth annual Delaware Cigar Festival will be taking place on Saturday, September 17 at the Delaware Park Racetrack. I’ll be attending this fine event and will bring you highlights. Delaware Park is a beautiful racetrack, and if you like to play the ponies or slots, it’s the place to be. Many manufacturers and their reps will be in attendance and it looks like it will be a good time. I’m a little embarrassed that I I have managed to miss this event in the past and it’s only about 40 minutes down the road from me. Looking forward to attending, and thank you to Gary Griffith for making this possible (and making damned tasty cigars!).

The the best cigar I had this week was the La Palina El Diario Robusto. The El Diaro line is La Palina’s “lower priced” line, compared to the $20 price tags on the original line that came out a couple years ago an is made in the Graycliff factory in the Bahamas. The El Diaro is rolled at the Raices Cubanas factory in Honduras, and carries a $10-11 price tag. It is most definitely an excellent cigar. It’s smooth and perfectly rolled. I’d happily smoke these all the time if they were a little more wallet friendly, but it’s been well established that I’m a cheap bastard. Bill Paley is a super nice guy though and he’s producing some exceptional cigars.

Nestor Miranda Art Deco Robusto Grande – This 5½ x 54 cigar was one that I bought on my Father’s Day cigar run. They come in a nifty tin instead of a box. If this had a handle on it it would make a fine lunchbox! It was a good cigar, no doubt. I don’t have a great deal of experience with Pepin Garcia’s cigars, admittedly, so I don’t readily pick up his signature on this, but it certainly was well made and it either grew on me as I smoked it, or the flavors in the second half were more in line with my preferences than the first half. I started out thinking it was just another DR blend that was “eh”…worth the try though…and not terribly priced. Frustratingly, there is no information about this cigar on the website, and it’s not exactly brand new.

Hammer + Sickle Robusto and Berlin Wall Robusto – These were samples from the IPCPR show. An old friend, Mike, was working at the booth, and I was very happy to catch up with him. We had met at a large herf in Vegas in 1999, known in the alt.smokers.cigars circles as Boondoggle 3, which consisted of about 300 cigar smokers taking over the ballroom at the MGM Grand for 3 days. Stories from that event are legend amongst the on-line cigar community of the era, and are easily Googleable, so I won’t go into that further. Anyway, Mike was kind enough to hook me up with some samples and introduce me to Victor, the owner of The Cigar Agency, who imports and distributes the Hammer + Sickle brand, as well as ORTSAC and others. I smoked both the regular Hammer + Sickle robusto as well as the new Berlin Wall robusto. The former I found to be a fairly typical Dominican cigar, well made, but nothing that really grabbed me. Keep in mind that most Dominican cigars don’t hit me the way I like to be hit, flavor wise, so that’s not as bad as it sounds. The Berlin Wall, on the other hand, was much more to my liking, no doubt due to it being made my Camacho and consisting of a blend of Honduran, Dominican and Nicaraguan leaf. The copper band is a very nice touch. I took the Berlin wall on my evening walk, and the ash, although it wasn’t the prettiest, held on for nearly a mile! Both of these cigars come in unique packaging. The Hammer + Sickle is in a crystal box, and the Berlin wall is packaged in a marble box with a relief of the Brandenburg Gate on the lid. Very innovative.