Posted: 11:14 AM ET, 05/06/07Yesterday was a picture-perfect Derby Day, and my wife and I attended a local party with about four dozen other couples, dressed in our derby finest. It was a top-notch affair, complete with a Dixie band playing Southern favorites, country ham on homemade biscuits and honey-dipped fried chicken, and maybe just a few too many mint juleps made with sour mash bourbon. Read more
Posted: 09:14 AM ET, 05/04/07
My mobile phone rang early the other morning in Los Angeles, which woke me from dreams of sake and Trinidad Robusto Extras the night before. It was a bit hazy, but it was a familiar voice coming out of the small speaker—Josh Meerapfel, the young tobacco entrepreneur and grower who produces the best Cameroon wrapper in the world. Read more
Posted: 10:32 AM ET, 05/03/07Due to a computer malfunction, this blog did not go live until May 3.
Live Free or Die. That’s the motto on New Hampshire’s license plates. I was there last weekend for another round of soccer in another place far from home and spent another night in another non-descript motel within spitting distance of an Interstate highway. Read more
Posted: 10:42 AM ET, 04/30/07I saw this this morning over my coffee, and I thought I better chime in. The parameters for aging cigars is always slightly subjective, but I prefer to have mine a little dry. That’s how it’s always been done in England, and the British are the specialists in aging smokes. Read more
Posted: 04:46 PM ET, 04/25/07I just lit a La Gloria Cubana Reserva Figurado Selectos de Lujo, one of my favorite cigars. It’s a seven-inch long perfecto made from fourth priming tobacco that’s blended with an emphasis on balance. What a great smoke.
Puffing it this morning reminded me of my first La Gloria, which I smoked before I started working at Cigar Aficionado magazine. Read more
Posted: 07:46 AM ET, 04/25/07
About a week ago I had a small dinner party at my house in Tuscany with Giacomo Neri of Casanova di Neri and Vicenzo Abbruzzese of Valdicava. These two guys are some of the best wine producers in Italy, making Tuscany’s famous red, Brunello di Montalcino. Read more
Posted: 10:28 AM ET, 04/24/07One of my first lessons in how cigars can be incredibly inconsistent came during the first few months after we had launched Cigar Aficionado. At the time, our ratings system was causing a bit of a storm in the cigar industry. Read more
Posted: 05:02 PM ET, 04/23/07Case in point: the promotional gift that just arrived on my desk with an invitation to a luncheon celebrating tourism in the state of Kentucky. It’s a miniature baseball bat from Louisville Slugger, about 15 inches long. Normally, you have to tour the factory to get a piece of wood like this, and while it may not seem very useful, I’ve found that if you like to serve Mint Juleps at this time of year, you can’t have enough of them. Read more
Posted: 04:30 PM ET, 04/19/07On the way home from work the other night I dropped in on Club Perfecto, my local cigar club. Pete Johnson was in town, and I wanted to talk to him about his Tatuaje cigars.
I walked in the door, said hello to some of the people I know, then shook hands with Pete. Read more
Posted: 01:13 PM ET, 04/18/07I was excited. It was spring of 1992, and Marvin Shanken and I headed off the Dominican Republic to tour the nation’s cigar factories. I had been smoking cigars for nearly 15 years, but I had never actually set foot inside an honest to goodness factory. Read more
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