Vitola: Short Torpedo- 5” x 54 ring gauge
- MSRP $8.50
- Purchased at Burns Tobacconist
Background
Short Tales is intended to be a 10-part series from Saga Cigars. Each cigar will be a fairly short smoke with a specific story to tell, and to keep up the theme, the boxes are designed to look like books, even so far as to have the story of the cigar in a couple pages that fold over the actual cigars themselves. I had the first Short Tales several months ago (“Tales of High Priming”) but wasn’t blown away by it, so I elected to pass on doing a review. When the second in the series shipped, I tried it and found it much more in tune with my palate, so I decided to write it up.
The second Short Tales (Tomo II…or “Volume 2”) is subtitled “Tales of the Land Cotuí.” Cotuí is a city in the Yamasá mountain range of the Dominican Republic. The wrapper is grown on farms owned by Monika Kelner. If that sounds vaguely familiar, it could be because the same family and region provides a wrapper leaf to Davidoff. I’m not saying this is the same wrapper…but I’m not saying it’s not. The binder is an Indonesian Sumatra leaf and the filler contains Dominican negrito and pilot along with Connecticut broadleaf.
As stated before, I had one sample of this before today. I bought this review sample at Burns Tobacconist and I got some of the background information from halfwheel’s news story about the release.
Prelight
The book boxes are really cool on this line…enough so that I took an empty “Tales of High Priming” box home with me even though I didn’t like the cigar. And I have a customer who declared that he will buy all 10 of the series, even if he doesn’t like them (but he did like the first two releases), because the boxes will look cool on his bookcase. The band is a typical Saga band and the green “Short Tales” secondary band is fine, though I kind of wish they had decided to color code the bands so it would be easier to differentiate the releases just by band color. I guess that would have been a lot of extra money, but…I still wish they had done it.
The wrapper was a toasted caramel color with a little bit of darker smudging and mottling in places. It had a lot of oiliness under my fingertips and had an aroma that was a mix of barnyard and fresh-cut hay. The foot had more earthiness to it than anything else, although there was hints of cedar in there, too.
I clipped the end and got a good test draw that tasted like earth and citrus.
Flavor
Lighting up the Short Tales Domo II took a little patience. My favored lighter is a single-flame torch and it will take a little longer to fully toast the foot of a cigar larger than 50 ring gauge…but it does still give you better control over where the flame goes. The cigar starts out at a medium-plus body with flavors of cedar right up front and some earthiness coming close behind. The beginnings also held a bit of lemon zest and grassy notes. The retrohale had more citrus and some short, but sharp, pepper spice.
Burning my way into the second third, the earthier qualities of the flavor profile had diminished, in favor of more grassy and citrusy notes, riding on a solidly medium-bodied smoke.
The Short Tales 2 ended with more citrus, more grass, and an increase of pepper on the palate. It maintained a pure medium-body through the end after starting off with with slightly more.
Construction
Both samples of this cigar I had drew very well, had a solid ash and an even-enough burn line.
Value
The price tag is very good for a short-production cigar, and the cigar was very good, so I call that good value.
Conclusions
The Short Tales Domo II, Tales of the Land Cotuí, was a very good cigar end to end, though it wasn’t the most complex cigar I’ve had from Saga. It had plenty of grassy and citrus notes that are prevalent in a lot of Dominican tobacco, with a nice sweet bump from the Broadleaf and negrito in the mix. It is definitely original in the Saga catalog and a sequel that I felt was better than the original story.
By-The-Numbers
Prelight: 2/2
Construction: 2/2
Flavor: 4/5
Value: 1/1
Total: 9/10
