Allofus123 said:
I'm not sure a majority of the people here smoking them have enough experience to make that call. Sorry, calling it as I see it.
This lends nothing to this person hawking his wares just that these tastings have been tainted by the posting of reviews and a less than qualified panel of judges..... cary on!
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Well, you may very well be right Kenny -- certainly there are many cigars that I wouldn't be able to pick out if it were a blind test. I'm going to be stubborn on this one tho, only because Cohiba's have a fairly distinctive taste profile, and at least the "Esplendido"s that he sent to Neal and I were utterly repulsive smokes.
Both because they have fairly distinctive tastes, and because I've smoked a number of them... Padróns, Opus, Cohibas, and a few other lines, I'm fairly confident I'd be able to identify. However...
Reminds me of some blind testing they did with Coke and Pepsi. Diehard Coke/Pepsis fans were utterly unable to pick out one from the other with any consistency at all. The split was almost exactly down the middle, despite some people having a very strong preference for one or the other going into it.
When the brands were put back on the Coke/Pepsi, then the ratio changed dramatically in terms of what people liked (Coke won). It was a textbook case of the power of branding.
Which reminds me of a guy at our club, who "smokes only Cubans" -- another guy there slipped a Cohiba band on a $3 domestic cigar, and gave it to him. This was a guy who would flat-out refuse to smoke anything but Cubans. He absolutely loved the cigar, was waxing on and on about how wonderful it was. But then again, he's an idiot.
In the end, the bottom line is that most people here have trusted sources they buy from, and aren't about to bother with yet another "friend at the factory" story. These always seem to turn out that either the seller is deceptive, or the seller was duped by these wonderful "friends at the factory".
Certainly that alone isn't damning -- some people do indeed have these contacts -- but that combined with how this cigar smoked... more than enough for me. Everyone should of course take that opinion with a grain of salt, and make up their own minds.