Scoring

How I Rate a Cigar Experience

I look at cigars a little differently than most reviewers do.

I didn’t take a different approach just to be different. I simply wanted a way to evaluate cigars that reflects how I actually experience them. As Michael Herklots of Ferio Tego once said in an article, “Blenders don’t look at cigars in the same way they’re reviewed.” I wanted my reviews to reflect that.

Traditional reviews tend to focus on flavor notes, construction, and burn. Those things still matter to me, but mostly as context. What I’m really paying attention to is how those flavors organize and behave as I smoke a cigar.

That’s why I built the Seven Pillars framework.

The Experience Rating you see in my reviews is the measure that comes out of that framework: my assessment of the cigar as a whole experience and how much I enjoyed it.

The Seven Pillars of the Experience

These are the criteria I use to evaluate the encounter. They’re the structural beams that define whether a cigar feels authored, intentional, and alive.

1. Structure

How the cigar holds itself together as a system. Does it have a clear backbone? Does it maintain integrity under heat and time?

2. Identity

Does the cigar know what it wants to be? Does it express a coherent core, or does it drift?

3. Tension

The energy of the experience. Does the cigar have brightness, movement, or upward motion? Or does it compress or tighten? Or is it pulled directionally? None is better than another, but it’s important that there is some sort of energy.

4. Intention

Does the cigar feel engineered or accidental? Are its choices deliberate, or does it stumble into its profile?

5. Refinement

Not smoothness — clarity. Does the cigar resolve its ideas cleanly, or does it collapse into noise?

6. Architecture

How the components integrate. Does the cigar behave like a designed system with internal logic?

7. Resonance

This is the pillar that measures the “enjoy” in Cut. Light. Enjoy. The first six pillars are about the cigar. Resonance is about how I actually feel about it. A cigar can score highly across the first six pillars, but in the end, the score still has to reflect how much I actually liked the experience.

These seven pillars form the basis of the score. They’re the grammar that I use in my reviews.

How the Numerical Score Works

The score is not a tally of flavors or technical performance. It’s a holistic reading of how fully the cigar fulfilled the seven pillars.

94–100 — The cigar expresses its identity with clarity, motion, and intention. It feels authored. It has a narrative arc. It leaves a lasting impression.
90–93 — The cigar is coherent, structured, and purposeful. It may not be transformative, but it delivers a meaningful experience.
87–89 — The cigar has ideas but lacks execution. It may be static, unfocused, or inconsistent in its motion. Or, it may be well-executed, but not really move me. A 90 is usually my minimum score to earn a review, but there are exceptions, especially if a cigar has something to say.
Below 87 — The cigar feels accidental, unresolved, or structurally incoherent. It may have flavor, but it lacks a defined experience. These cigars rarely appear on the site. I have a personal policy to avoid publishing negative reviews. The world has enough negativity; I don’t need to add to it. If a cigar falls below this threshold, I simply don’t write about it.

Think of the score as a reading, not a tally. A way of capturing the totality of the encounter in a single number, sort of a signal strength indicator for the experience.

The Score Has Consequences

The score ultimately determines how a cigar may fit into my long‑term rotation. Once a cigar shows how fully it fulfills the seven pillars, my buying decisions follow a simple pattern:

94 and above — Automatic box‑worthy. A cigar at this level has enough structure, identity, and intention to earn a permanent place in my rotation. I will probably buy a box without hesitation, and it could become part of what I smoke regularly.
90–93 — Strong, coherent, and purposeful. These cigars deliver a meaningful experience, but they need the right price to justify box space. I’ll buy a box only on a genuinely compelling deal; otherwise, they stay in the “selective‑restock” category.
87–89 — Fiver or single‑stick territory. These cigars may have interesting ideas or moments, but they don’t fully resolve across the seven pillars. I’ll revisit them occasionally, but they won’t occupy long‑term real estate in my humidor.
Below 87 — These are a “never buy” for me. Also, I will — and have — politely decline one if I was given it for free. Life is too short to smoke sub-par cigars!

This keeps the rating system honest: the number isn’t abstract. It has consequences. It determines what I buy, what I revisit, and what becomes a permanent part of my rotation. The score is a reading of the whole encounter, and that reading shapes how I buy and what I keep in my rotation.

Does Price Factor In?

Of course it does, just not in the score itself. The score tells me whether a cigar is something I’d buy again and whether it earns box space. After that, price comes into play within the reality of what I can reasonably afford. For example, I gave a high rating to the Zino Platinum Crown Tubo Gordo, but at $58 a cigar, spending nearly $600 on a box of ten isn’t practical.

While my scoring system flattens the playing field by measuring the experience, price still matters when it comes to how I categorize cigars. Cost establishes the general tier, but I don’t treat premium and luxury as rigid price brackets. How the cigar is positioned and presented also plays a part. The score tells me whether I want the cigar again; the price tells me how often I can realistically buy it.

Price doesn’t change the score, but it does change how the cigar fits into my rotation, whether it’s something I can buy freely or something I reserve for special occasions.

Why I Score This Way

Because I’m not just scoring whether a cigar tastes good. I’m scoring the experience of smoking it: how it develops, how well it holds together, what it does along the way, and how I feel about it when I’m done.

And to be honest, taking an inventory of flavor notes always felt incomplete. I developed this system because I knew there was more to a cigar than what’s on a flavor wheel.

Don’t get me wrong. Flavor notes are useful. They give people a sense of what to expect. But after reading so many reviews of cigars described as having coffee, cedar, black pepper, and chocolate, I realized that what really differentiated one cigar from another was behavior.

And yes, in my framework, spice has a zipcode.

That’s what my Experience Rating is meant to capture.