Vitola: Gran Churchill
Size: 7″ x 50 ring gauge
Price $39 MSRP
Gift from a friend
Background
This is the sixth release Davidoff has done to celebrate the Chinese new year, with The Year of the Dog. This year’s release, like a couple of previous, comes packed in a very ornate 10 count box that has lots of red and gold colors, which are lucky colors to the Chinese. The cigar has a limited production of only 4.500 boxes of 10. The cigar is comprised of San Vicente Ligero, Piloto Visus, Pilotos Seco and Esteli Visus fillers, a San Vicente Seco binder and an Ecuadorian Habano wrapper. This was the second one I was able to smoke.
Prelight
The first thing I notice is the second band, it seems a little out of place. For a cigar celebrating Chinese new year, I would expect the dog to look more stylistically Chinese rather than generic retriever. The wrapper is a caramel color with lots of tooth and oils to it. When I gave it a squeeze it was fairly firm with no soft spots. The wrapper gave off the a barnyard aroma with similar coming from the foot. After clipping it and taking a cold draw I got woody and salty flavors with a good draw.
Flavor
It starts off with a good amount of spice on the tongue and retrohale with flavors of wood, the “Davidoff flavor, earth, and coffee with hints of cinnamon. Towards the end of the first third I noted some sweetness on the finish as well. It starts at the upper end of medium-full strength. As I moved into the second third the spice backed up a bit but didn’t go away. In the second third I noted more of the “Davidoff flavor”, with some copper, earth, wood, and leather with a slightly sweet finish. The cigar stayed at medium-full strength during the second third. The final third saw the spice initially mellow out but return at the final stage of the cigar. The flavors were pretty similar to the second third. The strength did built up to the bottom end of full strength by the end.
Construction
As you’d expect from a limited edition Davidoff the draw and burn were great.
Value
Forty bucks for a cigar is a lot, unfortunately that seems to be the price point Davidoff is shooting for with their limited editions. That being said I might buy one or to sit on to see how they do.
Conclusions
To be completely honest this is first “Year of” cigar from Davidoff. Not that the others were bad, they just didn’t do anything for me. When I smoked the first one I was definitely surprised smoking it and this second one confirms that it is my favorite “Year of” cigar from them. It isn’t my favorite from them, there are a couple of those. Like previous releases in this line it should be smokeable by most people even though it got into the full strength range by the end, there wasn’t a lot of nicotine hit from it. If you’d like to give one of these a try before they go away SmallBatchCigar.com has them in stock now.
By-The-Numbers
Prelight: 1.5/2
Construction: 2/2
Flavor: 4.5/5
Value: 1/1
Total: 9/10
