Aging Small minutos and perlas

A reader asked about aging Montecristo No.5s.  I can only state what I would do.  Provided you had access to them, I would buy two or three boxes at a time and put them away and smoke new cigars of one or two years age while other boxes aged.  I would take the cigars out of their original packaging and place the cigars in either the varnished cedar plywood box of modern Cuban cabinets, or the solid cedar plank boxes many NC cigars come in today.  I'd keep unboxed cigars in amounts of 25-50 cigars on hand for grabbing.  Old cedar or mahogany really makes a nice home, especially mahogany as it is less aromatic and likely to become a dominant flavor in stored cigars like cedar does.  Just as pipe tobacco in a mason jar ferments and gets sweeter and offers an more intensely fragrant experience to the nose as time goes by, so will your Little Montes.  There are nice boxes around at your tobacconist, or you may already have several nice ones.  Real age will be happening in the boxes you hopefully fail to remember having buried somewhere.  If you want to artificially age them a little faster so you can smoke them quicker, just let the little dress boxes do their work and oxidize your smokes.  A cigar in that type of packaging peaks a lot earlier than something packed in cabinets.  You should get a variety of interesting tastes as they age, seemingly monthly, if you smoke them fast enough to notice.  It's such a consistent performer at any age, but all of the research I have done while in space points to 4 years as a basic spot where your cigars are performing at their peak and the burn and taste are very well balanced.  Age after that is beneficial, especially if the cigars are properly stored with as little direct contact to oxygen as possible.  I mean theoretically.  Chasing cigar performance over time is a rabbit hole...everything is fluid and crop dependent.  The way they used to make em is different every year, haha.   I find that the cocoa and cedar flavors as well as mouth coating is enhanced as the Montecristo No.5 ages into the limited perpetuity of my limited experience.  Tea flavors build in and add to the pleasure.  Buying more than you can consume per year by even one box in 12 months can really result in some great cigars in 5 years and super-sweet cigars in 10-20 cigars.  It's just the level of one's self-control that allows them to age.  You can either do it or you can't.  But the reward is certainly there.  If you wanted a lot of fantastic Montecristo No.5s or Shorts or Bolivar Coronas Junior, you can unbox and place into cedar as many as you can today, because no matter HOW long you age the smokes before smoking them, you have to START saving them before any of it can happen.  But specifically I feel like they peak at 7 years and age very gracefully from there.  In the dress box they can offer variable success.  The boxes don't seal all that well sometimes.  Two year old cigars would begin to develop a creaminess to go with their pepper and spice and leather.  This begins the balance process.  It comes into stride, I find, at 4 years.  And it's definitely worth it.