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RTDA Blog: Day Three

Posted: Wednesday, July 19, 2006

By David Savona

It's 4:30 here in Las Vegas and the show is one hour from being over. This is my 12th RTDA, and for the first time (at least the first time I can remember), the show has been trimmed to three days instead of four. It feels odd.

I'm going to miss the food here in Vegas for sure. Del Frisco's, where I ate last night with Litto Gomez at a party for his La Flor Dominicana brand, just might be the most cigar-friendly restaurant I've ever encountered. I think half the cigar industry was eating there last night: in addition to Litto, Jorge Padrón was there with his family, and I also saw Nick Perdomo, and Kaizad Hansotia of the Gurkha brand. At our party, we sat in a private room puffing on Litto's great new small batch LG cigar while eating prime steak and drinking great wine. "I'm a cheating vegetarian," said one of the people at my table, tucking into a bleeding 16 ounce ribeye. That was my third steak of the trip, and my second at Del Frisco's. (I ate there Sunday night with the folks from Altadis.) I might have to cut back tonight. Perhaps some veal.

While I'm thinking about food, let me coronate the best sandwich in Las Vegas -- it's the lobster club served at lunch at Postrio, the Wolfgang Puck restaurant here in the Venetian. I've had two on this trip. I know Wayne Suarez of Fuente and half the Ashton Cigars staff would back me on this vote. Combine lobster in a savory, creamy sauce with a thick slab of bacon on seven-gain toasted bread, with a tomato in there for all you vegetarians. I wonder if they do mail order?

I sat down with Tim Ozgener today to look over the C.A.O. Vision, his company's first Dominican cigar. It's made by La Aurora with the company's Corojo-seed Dominican wrapper. (The box it comes in is amazing, and looks like a laptop computer crossed with a humidor.) I smoked one at the C.A.O. party, but it was the end of the night and my palate was shot, so I reserved judgment. The one I smoked today was toasty and medium bodied, with some coconut notes and a pleasant woody spiciness. I smoked it after a La Aurora 100 Años that was stronger and woodier. Cigar No. 3 today was a Cuban, courtesy of the folks at Casa del Habano in Tijuana. It's one of the custom-rolled jobs from roller Taboada. Nice smoke. It's hearty and complex.

One of the most interesting cigars I saw at the show was the Felipe Power Leopard, a cigar made with two wrappers in a way I've never seen before. After wrapping a cigar with a light wrapper, a second, darker, wrapper is cut with varying sizes of circles then wrapped around the first wrapper, revealing light circles. They also have a version where the bottom wrapper is candela. Interesting concept. I haven't had a chance to smoke one of those, but I did have a prototype Power earlier this year when I interviewed Philip Wynne for a Cigar Aficionado Q&A, and I really enjoyed the smoke.

Lots of thick cigars here. Alec Bradley has a new brand called Maxx with a 60-ring smoke called The Freak. One of the special C.A.O. Brazilia-Italia cigars is about the fattest cigar I've ever seen, with a ring gauge of about 75. (Tim says he cut it down from 135. Good call.) I'm smoking a thin cigar now, a new Joya de Nicaragua Antaño 1970. It's a lancero shape, which I love, but I think I'm in the minority. Cigar smokers today gravitate toward thick cigars, but this size works for me. It's a heck of a smoke, pretty strong, lots of charry wood and a good touch of leather and nougat on the finish. The ash is as white as Wayne Newton's teeth, quite the contrast to the dark brown wrapper. I'm enjoying this.

Tonight it's back to Postrio for dinner with the Padróns, plus Michael Moretti and Gregory Mottola from Cigar Aficionado. Tomorrow we'll be back home. My bags are stuffed with new cigars, my notebook overflowing with information that we'll put in Cigar Insider starting next week as we put together our comprehensive coverage of RTDA. There's going to be quite a lot of new cigars heading to your cigar shops soon, and we're going to cover them all.