Vitola: Divino (Robusto)- 5” x 50 ring gauge
- ~$6.00
- Purchased at Burns Tobacconist
Background
It seems like another lifetime ago…and in some ways, it really way…CAO Cigars was a “Nashville Original” with a rich and growing portfolio of cigars, highlighted by La Traviata, a budget-friendly cigar that had set the marketplace on notice that a stogie didn’t have to cost $10 to deliver an exceptional experience. Shortly thereafter La Traviata Maduro was announced and began shipping in 2010, as I recall. And shortly after that, it was announced that CAO Cigars was being absorbed into the General Cigar Company catalog.
Panic ensued in some quarters. One of which was the cigar shop I frequented (and later worked at), Burns Tobacconist of Chattanooga, Tennessee. They decided to stop carrying CAO products after the brand was sold to the giant conglomerate, so they had an event at which they blew out all the remaining stock. I bought a box of La Traviata Maduro Divinos and put it in a coolidor to age for a few years.
A “few years” turned into a decade before I finally got around to opening that box. I expected the Nicaraguan and Dominican blend, covered in a Connecticut Broadleaf Maduro wrapper, to have lost its strength and spice in the ensuring time, but…well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I did pay about $6 per stick for these back in the day, but time has taken its toll on pricing in the cigar industry and I would expect them to cost $8 to $9 on today’s market. To be clear, these are “original” Nashville-based-CAO La Traviata Maduros. I tried the General version a year or so after they came out and they were…well, they were bad. I’m not surprised that the blend is out of production altogether based on those early General LT Maduros.
Notes
The cellophane of the LT Maduro was slightly browned over the years. The wrapper leaf was a medium-dark brown color with some darker mottling and a little oiliness still. As befitting a cigar of this price range, it wasn’t perfect. There was a patch where there had at one time been a hole in the wrapper. It was lumpy, bumpy, and rustic-looking.
The wrapper leaf had a mix of earth and cocoa powder aroma. The foot was a richer earthiness with espresso bean and dark chocolate and hay in the mix. I clipped the end and got an excellent cold draw that had an abundance of chocolate flavor…almost so much that it tasted infused or sweetened.
Firing up the La Traviata Maduro, I got tons of earth and cocoa powder on the palate, with a little black pepper and espresso bean coming in behind that. The retrohale was fiery with red pepper flake and roasted nuttiness.
As I started to mention earlier, it’s amazing to me that a mostly-Nicaraguan blend lost little of its strength, body, and spice after a decade in deep storage at my house. I gave several of these to friends after I first cracked open the box and I smoked about half a dozen more. It’s still in the medium-to-full bodied range with tons of pepper in the retrohale and a decent amount on the palate. And it still tastes great…which is better than I can say of the General-produced version of this blend.
Don’t get me wrong…General Cigar has done a fine job with the CAO blend and under Rick Rodriguez’s leadership, the brand has produced some stellar blends. The fact remains, though, that the majority of the cigar lines brought over from the old company were better under that regime. It’s probably better to just think of it as two separate companies than a single continuum.
