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‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE SMOKING!

New, seasonal tastes from General Cigar for the fall season

Los Angeles, November 15 – With big-names brands like Macanudo, Partagas, Hoyo de Monterrey, Punch, Cohiba and more, who needs new brands?

But General Cigar is never satisfied with the status quo. Now it’s introduced seasonal selections with both taste and bite and we’re happy to review them today:

• Partagas Cifuentes Seasonal Blend: Fall 2004
This is likely a first: a cigar offered for a limited period with a blend created for a specific time of the year!

It’s offered in three shapes: Septiembre (5 1/2 x 49), Octubre (6 x 54) and Noviembre (6 1/2 x 45). We tried the Octubre and were highly impressed.

This is a dense, thick, square-pressed cigar that has the feel of quality and class so long associated with Partagas. The oily wrapper only accelerates your interest in lighting it.

The taste is remarkable and rewarding. There is a sweet tang of deep fruit – a favored taste of ours – that fills the mouth with a happy taste. It has medium-to-full-bodied power, but the tang is the star.

This river of flavor is accented in mid-course by a touch of pepper, but it remains sweet and attractive. This is a well-made cigar with a wonderfully unique flavor that stands apart – in a good way – from the famed Partagas flavor so familiar to American smokers.

Grade: a solid “A.”

• Diablo
We’ve covered General’s all-out promotion for this new blend for its “tabacos picante” blend. So what about the cigar itself?

It’s offered in four sizes: Caliente (5 x 50), Picante (5 x 40), Pimiento (6 1/2 x 45) and Gran Fuego (6 x 60 pyramid). All are well constructed and burn easily.

The taste is astounding: almost exactly what you would expect for a cigar advertised as “hot and spicy.” It has a full body but is not heavy in the mouth. Diablo exhibits a taste of light, flat pepper with a spicy finish. It’s intruiging, but never bitter and always accessible.

This is a good cigar to finish off a heavy meal and it will stand up well to a full-flavored after-dinner drink. It will certainly be a welcome companion on a winter’s night.

Grade: “Picante,” yes, but it doesn’t have the character of our highest-ranked pepperpots: B+.

Hammer Time:
Arthur Zaretsky’s Famous Smoke Shop now has a companion site, CigarAuctioneer.com, offering cigars and accessories up for bid. And things are getting interesting on this site.

Ending today is a “Yankee Auction” for 72 hard-to-find Padron Serie 1926 No. 1 Maduros (6 3/4 x 54) with the bidding started at $1. Essentially, here are three boxes of No. 1s, broken up into individual lots, for your bidding pleasure.

The “Yankee Auction” is a protocol by which the highest bidders will win the merchandise at their bid price, leaving the remainder (if any) to the next highest bidders.

This is a unique way to offer these highly-sought-after cigars in a way in which the buyers set the price. The initial price of $1 is very low, so the problems found on some eBay auctions of high reserve prices are not found.

There are also plenty of lower-profile cigars, but many of interest. Last week, an excellent sampler of eight Bahia blends (all in the robusto size) was up for a starting bid of less than $2 each.

Only one complaint: the presentation of each auction is so large on the screen and so loaded with graphics that it’s hard to get through all of them efficiently, even with a fast Internet connection. A better look would be to offer a condensed list of auctions with a simple subject line for identification and a click-through for more information and bigger graphics. Both eBay and Yahoo! auctions use this kind of format and it’s much more buyer-friendly.

Interested in the Padron 26s? The auction closes today at 9:59 p.m. Eastern time. Happy hunting!
~ Rich Perelman

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