| It's the most challenging of tests facing any cigar-making it onto Cigar Aficionado's Top 25 list. It's hard enough for a cigar to rise to the top of any one of our ratings, but to make it here requires consistent performance. A cigar must excel in not only one taste test, but in several. And the competition gets stiffer each time. It's an exhaustive search. We begin by scouring a year's worth of blind tastings from Cigar Aficionado magazine and Cigar Insider, our twice-monthly newsletter on cigars. We rate more than 700 cigars annually, and this year we looked at all the cigars that scored a minimum of 90 points, outstanding on our 100-point scale. We eliminated duplicates among brands, choosing the best of each, then sent our tasting coordinator out to buy new samples of the chosen cigars. Just as in the original tests, the coordinator stripped each cigar of its identifying cigar band and gave each cigar a new code known only to him (and he is not one of the tasters). The cigars were then smoked by a panel of senior tasters from the magazine, each with a minimum of 12 years experience in cigar tastings. The cigars were rated on their appearance, smoking characteristics, flavor and overall impression, and those scores were averaged for each cigar. At the conclusion of that round, the best of the cigars were rebanded once again with a new code and resmoked by the panel to ensure their consistent quality, and to find the very best. This final tasting consisted of 14 cigars, all of them wonderful, none of them mediocre. At the end, we had our cigar of the year, a smoke that was clear in our tasters' minds as the very best of a series of rigorous and exhaustive tests, a cigar that we found absolutely brilliant. |
Cigar Aficionado RSS Feed