Montecristo D EL 2005

I think that this blog is far too often a venue for reviewing the cigars I have on hand that are for my personal daily smoking and far too infrequently a place where you are likely to find the oddity in habanos, the rare or hard to find cigar.  Today that changed somewhat with the pulling up of a Montecristo "D" Edicion Limitada 2005.  This smoke was a cracking good stick, from it's first glimpse of daylight after 7 years asleep to the nubbly nub of finger-burning tobacco.  

It cut and lit well and I proceeded down to the pond to smoke the cigar, drink a Sierra Nevada Southern Hemisphere from a few years back, and watch my meat smoke and watch the fishes play.  And then I dropped my beer bottle on the patio and the morning became more about cleaning up my mess than smoking the relaxing cigar.  And even after all that bending and stooping and cutting myself with glass, the cigar maintained it's form.  Not sure why some glass breakages cut you even though you are an adult who is TRYING to be careful.  I could see a kid cutting himself, but a fully-grown, fully-aware adult?


The cigar drew firmly and offered up a decent amount of smoke that had a charry, chocolatey flavor with a small amount of cuban twang around the edges.  The flavor never really changed, except to say that it got more intense as I smoked through it, and tended to go out a bit, which gave it a few really intense moments of flavor.  I find a PROPERLY re-lit cigar has a really intense burst of good flavors for a time.  I picked up on a sassafrass root type taste a few times, and a slight wine flavor that came around a few times in the second half.  

Overall this was a pretty good cigar.  I am no fan of the EL program; too much money for too few cigars with too many dodgy results.  What's more they can be characterized as having too narrow a window of time to enjoy them.  I don't think  anyone knows whether they will be great in ten years or crap.  And even then, people lie.  But this smoke, at about 7 years of age, was a muted version of a really good cigar.  It had great written all over it but the flavors were too subtle for such a brawny smoke.  I would like to smoke this cigar in a thin, natural wrapper shade.  If I rated this one on flavor and not what I think it was holding BACK or didn't HAVE, I would rate it a 88.  But this could have been a much higher-scoring cigar, I can't escape that feeling.