Cigar Review: Côte d’Or by L’Atelier

• Vitola: Churchill
• 7” x 47 ring gauge
• Price $16.99
• Purchased at Burns Tobacconist

Background

Côte d’Or is the first new project from L’atelier in quite a while. They’ve had some line extensions of late, this is a totally new name for the company. The literal translation of the name depends on who you ask. Google says “côte d’or” is “Gold Coast,” while Wikipedia says “Golden Slope.” Since the area highlighted on the French map is not on the coast at all (and the area is said to be the site of the Burgundy vineyards)…I’m going to say Google is full of it (as usual) and Wikipedia is correct (which is not a given). (It probably means both “gold coast” and “golden slope,” but it’s French, so who really cares?…yes, that was a joke…relax, you Francophilic types!)

Why the cigar is named after the French “department” (analogous to “county” or something like that) not completely obvious, except that company founder Pete Johnson is a bit of a wine geek. Also some of the tobacco used in this blend is the Pelo de Oro (“golden hair”) varietal, so both have the “gold” name in them. And apparently Pelo de Oro and some grapes from côte d’or (notably the Pinot Noir) are difficult to work with and produce low yields (that’s according to Cigar-Coop…who I generally trust more than either Google or Wikipedia).

This is L’atelier’s most expensive offering to date, with a price tag staring at $16 (and going up from there depending on tobacco taxes in your locality). It uses Nicaraguan fillers (including the Pelo de Oro), an undisclosed binder, and an Ecuadorian Sancti Spiritus wrapper leaf (which itself is a hybrid of Criollo and Pelo de Oro…a replacement for Pelo de Oro). The wrapper is a higher priming than used on the regular L’atelier line and is said to be the same as the Selection Speciale line, although this looks to me like the darkest Sancti Spiritus wrapper yet (exact color always depends on a host of variables). One local note…here in the Southeast, we tend to butcher most Spanish words a bit…it just happens; French is even less familiar to us, so we absolutely spread it. “L’atelier” is “lataleer” or “luh-tal-yay” or something far worse. This one is “Coat Door!”

I bought one of these cigars and this review is based on the first experience with the blend.

Prelight

When you pay a lot for a cigar, you want it to look like you paid a lot, and that is the case here. The boxes of 10 are beautifully crafted to make the cigars look expensive, while the bands are a simple gold foil and embossing on a cream-colored, highly textured paper. The foot is adorned with a white satin ribbon.

The wrapper leaf underneath the band was a dark chocolate brown that most people will probably mistake for a Maduro. On close inspection the surface texture is toothy and you can feel a bit of sandpaperiness under your fingertips. It smelled of leather and wood, while the foot had notes of ripe earth and barnyard and leather.

I don’t want to finish up prelight observations without mentioning the shape. This is a Churchill size, but it is softly box-pressed. So softly that the cigar will roll if you set it to doing so on a flat surface, but it won’t roll freely or long because it is a bit squared. It’s a comfortable shape to hold, too.

After clipping the cap off the cigar, I got a very good draw with flavors of wood and earth, along with a chemical note that I found hard to pin down.

Flavor

Once lit there was no trace of that odd chemical flavor. Instead I got a rich earth, cedar, black coffee and dark fruit combination that had a bit of something even more unusual mixed in. Could that be the Pelo de Oro leaf’s flavor? I guess…it’s something we don’t get often so it’s hard to know what to expect. I got a bit of brown pepper on the retrohale, and just a dash on the palate, but neither was as much as one would expect from a My Father-produced stick.

The pepper increased as I got into the second third, where I got more cedar and earth. The flavor that I could only assume was the Pelo de Oro continued to provide a faintly sweet and unique note to the proceedings.

Toward the end, the Côte d’Or got stronger, although it stayed in the medium to full bodied range. The unique flavor notes of the Pelo de Oro continued throughout and I noticed the dark fruit sweetness picking up a bit as well, moving up in the profile to be more or less equal to the earth and wood notes.

Construction

I had to touch up the burn line a couple times, but it was nothing big. The draw was perfect and the ash was solid.

Value

$16+ is definitely a super-premium price, but with the low production run and unique flavor notes of this cigar (unique in a good way), I would call it worth it, at least as an occasional smoke.

Conclusions

The Côte d’Or was an excellent smoke with unique flavors due to the use of rare tobacco that played well with the rest of what is probably a fairly typical L’Atelier flagship blend. Is it a little pricey? Sure, but sometimes you have to pay more for something out of the ordinary. I’m thinking this should have excellent aging potential as the strength that came through at the end mellows out a bit and I would definitely recommend picking one to try, then a few more to age if you like the first one.

By-The-Numbers

Prelight: 2/2
Construction: 2/2
Flavor: 4.5/5
Value: 1/1
Total: 9.5/10