Cigar Review: Avo Classic Covers

Vitola: Toro
Size: 6″ x 50 ring gauge
Price $15.99 MSRP
Obtained From SmallBatchCigar.com as a review sample

Background

As Dave mentioned in his review here, this is the 2015 release to celebrate the birthday of Avo Uvezian, the founder of Avo Cigars.  I’ve had the opportunity to get to try a lot of the birthday releases, but I guess I wasn’t paying attention because I didn’t even realize this was the cigar for this year.  The review sample was my first experience with it.

Prelight

The wrapper on this sample was a nice medium brown in color with some veins and a good amount of oils.  When I gave it a squeeze it was fairly firm to the touch and there were no soft spots.  When I put my nose to the wrapper I got the light aroma of barnyard with a more intense barnyard coming from the foot.  When I clipped it and took a cold draw on it I got a slight sweetness and wood flavor with at tight draw.

Flavor

The cigar starts off with spice on the tongue and retrohale.  I also got a slight bitterness thrown in to the wood, “Davidoff mustiness”, leather and earth flavors. The cigar started off at medium strength.  The spice mellowed out as I moved into the second third.  I noted flavors of wood, leather, along with the “Davidoff flavor” thrown in.  The spice came back a bit but the cigar never moved out of the medium range.  The flavors kind of mellowed a lot as I got into the final third.  I found light flavors of leather, earth, wood with a salty sweet finish.  The cigar never moved out the medium strength throughout.

Construction

The draw was a little too tight for me even though I tried to get it to loosen up.  The burn was slightly wavy throughout.

Value

While the $16 price tag is par for the course for the Avo birthday releases this year’s didn’t do it for me.

Conclusions

If you checked out Dave’s review you’ll notice that we had very different experiences with this cigar.  That could have been the tight draw I had, or it could just be how this cigar hits our different palates.  Avo makes some good stuff so I’d at least give this one a try to see if you like it.

By-The-Numbers

Prelight: 2/2
Construction: 1.5/2
Flavor: 3.5/5
Value: .5/1
Total: 7.5/10