Wrapper: Dominican
Binder: Dominican
Filler: Dominican
Size: 6 X 54
Strength: Just below Medium → Medium (halfway) → Just above Medium (final third)
Body: Medium → Full (last couple of inches)
Price: TBD
Factory: Rodríguez Santana & Co. Cigars
Blender: Chris Moore / Santos Santana
Release: 2019
Smoking Time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Experience Rating: 99
As with the Cayman cigars I reviewed, I’m on a roll with Carolina Blue Cigars. I was going to take a break to space out the reviews, but there is a method to my madness. The Signature Maduro I’m smoking right now is Chris Moore’s first major release from 2019, and it uses all Dominican tobacco. On the other hand, the new Signature Maduro that is now part of the Essence of the Leaf series employs five different leaves; it’s essentially a completely different cigar. I’m smoking the original, then the new one, to track Chris’ evolution of the Signature Maduro line.
The Signature Maduro is a perfect example of the craftsmanship behind cigars that always fascinates me. Having gotten to know several blenders, it’s amazing to witness their thinking: the constant process of evaluating and re-evaluating their work; how they think about tweaking and adjusting individual blends, but also, especially in Chris’ case, how they think about the overall presentation of their ligas and how they want to move them forward.
Case in point, the Classic was a Dominican puro, but the newer Essence has a much more sophisticated composition. If you look at the entire Essence of the Leaf series, there are no puros. What seems clear to me is that with the Classic, Chris was still playing it safe to get a product and his brand to market.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with playing it safe and keeping things familiar when you’re a new brand. But now that he has some road behind him and an established following, he can take his blends in a direction that better fits his vision of the brand.
Which brings us to the Classic Signature Maduro. You won’t find this listed on his site, but Chris says he will sell what he has in stock. He has one hundred or so left. I know nothing about this blend other than that it’s a Dominican puro with close to seven years of post-roll aging.
Let’s get into the cigar.
This is a gorgeous cigar. A thin sheen of oil glistens on the wrapper in the sunlight. There’s a little veinage, but no tree trunks. The wrapper smells of rich tobacco with a faint sweetness. The foot smells like Swiss milk chocolate and flowers. That chocolate bowls me over! I love chocolate. It’s clear that shelf time has been good to this cigar.
I light it up.
Immediate intoxication.
The first puff hits me with a blast of rich chocolate and roasted nuts. Coffee enters a couple of puffs in, alongside white pepper and a light spice that punctuates the finish and settles on the roof of my mouth. I immediately get a sense of expanse and dimensionality in the profile. I don’t feel any gravity pulling the profile in one direction, but the cigar is so good from the start that it has all my attention.
I’m barely through the first half inch, and the cigar is hitting me with a broadside of complexity. Floral notes, baking spices, yeasty bread, malt, hot chocolate, vanilla, saltwater taffy, nougat, golden apple. I think I catch a peek of cream. I can feel its presence. Body is medium, and strength sits just below the medium mark. Holy shit! This profile is magnificent!
This is a great example of how little wrapper color tells you about strength. You see a cigar this dark with Maduro on the band and expect at least medium strength, especially if you mostly smoke Nicaraguan or Honduran sticks. The Signature Maduro sits just below that. And this is where the moderate strength pays off. There’s so much energy and expression in the profile.
This stick harkens back to a time when the expressiveness of Dominican cigars reigned supreme, before the US market turned to the darker Nicaraguan and Honduran expressions. Yes, they could be like a Wandering Jew vine, but the best ones were incredibly structured and composed while being magnificently expressive. The Signature Maduro is falling into the latter camp.
This is going to be a long smoke. I’m 22 minutes in and barely through the first inch. I was planning on hitting the golf range after this smoke, but I’m going to be here a while.
I’m becoming hypnotized by the complexity as the flavors begin to cycle. All of them. By now, most Nicaraguan and Honduran cigars would have established a core theme. The Signature Maduro still doesn’t seem to have settled into one. But amazingly, I don’t detect any chaos. The composure and inherent structure are remarkable.
An inch and a quarter after 30 minutes? I’m not going to make it to the range. But look at that burn line! It’s as straight as a West Texas freeway. If you’ve ever driven from Tucson, AZ, through Las Cruces, NM, to Fort Worth, TX, you know the stretch I mean. You come down the hill from Las Cruces, thankfully bypass Juárez, and all you see ahead of you is straight road for hundreds of miles. It sucks. But in the case of this burn line, it’s a good thing.
The ash finally falls at the two-inch mark, and the profile seems to settle. The flavor shifts continue, but chocolate, cedar, coffee, and baking spices have left the rotation and moved to the center. The spice has moved from the roof of my mouth to the top of my tongue. It might sound like the cigar is finally organizing itself, but even without a core, it never felt disorganized. I chalk it up to a change in presentation.
And that calls to mind something Chris and I talked about yesterday. He said he works with the blender to place the leaves in a particular order and orientation in the bunch, precisely to create transitions as the cigar burns. This reorganization feels like a result of how the leaves were placed.
Dammit! I’m at the one-hour mark, and I’m still less than halfway there. Yeah, I’m REALLY not going to make it to the range!
The flavor spin-o-rama keeps moving. Just short of halfway, a gorgeous green apple steps in and practically startles me. The next puff brings burnt toffee. Now here’s something wild. I retrohale and taste deep-fried, fresh-caught fish. I shit you not.
It’s not that the profile is fishy. Far from it. But that one retrohale takes me straight back to the DR. I’m sitting on the beach under an awning when a guy walks by with a stringer of fish he just caught. I call him over, and he offers to take one to the beachside kitchen to cook it up. I pick a parrotfish. Wow! That was a vivid and welcome memory.
I finally pass the halfway mark at 2:11. Both body and strength are a solid medium. The chocolate starts to assert itself, and I feel like Augustus swimming in Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. I’m giving up hope that I’ll make it to the range.
This has become a chocolate bomb!
But unlike the heavy and sometimes cloying Nicaraguan chocolate bombs I’ve had in the past, this one doesn’t weigh me down. It’s still incredibly energetic and expressive. Its main theme now centers on rich, creamy milk chocolate. I’m going to sit with this a while and enjoy its goodness.
As I move into the final third, the spice lifts off my tongue and moves back to the roof of my mouth. I can feel another transition coming. Could there be a change in leaf placement here?
By the way, look at that burn line! I’ve made ZERO corrections this entire smoke! If I were a flavor note accountant, I’d be giving this high marks for technical execution. No deductions.
Suddenly, it’s all quiet on the Western Front with a couple of inches remaining. Coffee and chocolate darken, and the cream thins. The active secondary layer fades, and the profile takes on a more contemplative character. I find myself sitting at a sidewalk cafe in the Kings Cross district in Sydney, Australia. My beautiful wife sits across from me, reading a book, and I drift off, savoring my cocoa-laced coffee.
All of a sudden, the body jumps to full as thick white clouds of smoke pour from my mouth with each exhale. Strength ticks up just a hair past medium with that thickening. What amazes me is that the profile has become gravitational without any heaviness or compression. There is also zero pressure from nicotine. It’s as if the profile has simply become more focused.
Looking back, even though most of the smoke has been highly energetic, I’m not mentally exhausted. The flavor cycling had the velocity of the transitions in the Southern Draw Manzanita, but not the intensity to overwhelm me.
As I enter the last couple of inches, the spice moves back to my tongue, coating it. A dark, caramelly toffee appears, replaces the cream, and joins the coffee and cocoa. A faint sweetness forms on the finish, providing lift as the profile continues to darken.
My wife looks up from her book and smiles at me, silently signaling that she’s ready to leave. I smile back and point to my coffee. She buries herself back in her book. We’re both content to just hang out and enjoy each other’s company.
With the cigar winding down, just when I think nothing else is going to happen (which is just fine with me because I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my toffee-cocoa coffee), incense shows up on the finish. I’m suddenly transported back to 1988, sitting with my friend Shirley, the owner of the San Jose Book Store.
It was a New Age bookstore, dedicated to the occult and the hippy-dippy culture. Back then, I hung out with Native American medicine men, went to sweat lodges, and practiced the natural healing arts. My hair was long, and yes, I wore beads. But I never got into tie-dye clothing. That was for the Dead Heads. I was in a constant state of prayer, looking inward, trying to find myself. I have fond memories of that time.
Where that memory came from, I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t care. This cigar has taken me on a great journey, both outward and inward.
The more I delve into the depths of cigar journalism, the more I realize that there’s so much I don’t know, and more importantly, so much yet to be discovered. Every cigar has a story to tell. And sometimes, in the right moments, a cigar can take you to unexpected places.
I look at the time. It took me two hours and forty minutes to finish the cigar to the nub.
The range closes in 20 minutes. So much for practice.
Sorry for not listing pricing. I got mine in a mixed sample pack, so I don’t have an accurate per stick cost.
As I mentioned above, these aren’t listed on his website. But if you email him at contact@carolinabluecigars.com, you can request what you want to buy. He will probably reply to fill out his order form. Make sure to write a note specifying that you want the Classic Signature Maduro.
Here’s an interesting aside. In our conversation yesterday, he spoke about cigars that are sitting in his aging room that have never been released. The story goes that during the pandemic lockdown, he had the factory do a run of cigars that would just sit in the aging room and not be released. They’re now for sale. Check out his Small Batch page. It’s a roll of the dice because he’ll make the selections, but it’s cool to be able to smoke some unreleased sticks!
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