BLEND: Black
WRAPPER: Habano Dark
BINDER: Nicaraguan Habano
FILLER: Nicaraguan
FORMAT: Toro (652)
ORIGIN: Nicaragua
INTENSITY: Medium-full
NOTES:
Semi-sweet chocolate | Roasted oranges | Black licorice
Dark and precision-focused on careful detail. A swarthy stamp collector? Sitting behind a mahogany desk, sure. Excellent bitter-sweet give and take. Nicely subtle and balanced complexities. Chocolate has two ticks of vanilla addition. Black licorice is quite there. Roasted oranges show cinnamon and buckwheat honey. Lip-smacking savoriness scans like a sploosh of Worschestshire sauce.
A goodly hard and toasted woodsy structure allows play between notes only so much and mostly delineates in a strict fashion. Nice height to the profile. Black peppercorn helps keep the layering from collapsing on itself. An occasional retro-hale (because it does singe) lends some leathery spice that hits the palate as molasses. A consistent delivery but a fairly entertaining experience. I almost taste a Latakia creosote hint.
Onto construction and combustion, we go. A seam does stretch apart some but doesn't fly away, and the spot gets smoked through cleanly. The burn-line happens somewhat jaggedly-so but doesn't mandate a retouch. Some fluting. Ash grows quickly and densely. The draw snugs up here and there but not so I'd notice if not acting like our stamp collector. Copious smoke out-put yields a sweet-roasted aroma of wood and leather.
Visions of a paneled study in a sleeping house lit only by a solitary desk lamp. Coffee brewing and to be drunk black. A bit of late night philately surely afoot.
TASTE: A-
DRAW: B+
BURN: B
BUILD: B
FINAL GRADE: B+
A 90-100 B 80-89 C 70-79
::: very :::