5 out of 5
5
5
0
La Aroma de Cuba Mi Amor Belicoso
by Joseph G.
on Oct 17, 2015
This cigar is one of my personal favorites. I keep a cigar dossier to track the performance of every cigar I smoke, assuming it is of note. I rated this cigar a 95 because it is a bold but extremely well-balanced flavor from the first draw to the last. It starts slowly and confidently, builds like a crescendo, and finishes beautifully. No doubt the cigar begins to reach it's peak about a third of the way through. This is common with all cigars, I suspect due primarily to the tobaccos gradually heating up, the humidity reducing, the draw improving, and the oils becoming more free flowing. I've been smoking premium and super premiums for about 20 years, and every time I light one up, my knowledge increases. I've read for years about nuances like chocolate, spice, nuts, leather, earth and what have you, but it is clear to me that these many adjectives are simply an attempt to characterize the complexity of the cigar with some kind of vocabulary that best describes the overall experience, and not intended to be accurate. I've never had a cigar that tasted anything like chocolate or leather, and I certainly hope I never do. A cigar is either bad, not so bad, OK, good, very good, really good, outstanding, fantastic or unbelievably delicious. The flavor runs the gamut from mild to bold, and the balance is either appropriate or not. Mi Amor Belicoso is somewhere between outstanding and fantastic, promising to become unbelievably delicious sometime in the relatively near future if kept correctly in a good humidor saturated with plume. It took me about 3 ½ years to get a culture of plume growing inside my humidor, but worth all the effort. Plume can make a mediocre cigar a lot better, and a great cigar unbelievably delicious. I've had Mi Amor in my humidor for years, and it just keeps getting better. Like big red wines, cigars improve with age only if properly cared for. The other factor I always assess is the shape. I love a good robusto or toro, but the real hits come in belicosos, torpedos, figurados and perfectos. These shapes are very difficult to roll, and generally speaking, only the more experienced rollers can pull these shapes off. Consequently they typically burn the best and have the best draw. Like a wine goblet, which pulls into focus the complexity and intricacies of the wine from the large diameter into the smaller one, a torpedo or belicoso concentrates the flavor into a smaller opening than the ring size, provided you don't cut too far down the head. Belicosos are one of my favorite shapes, along with torpedos, perfectos and figurados. Probably the perfect shape of a cigar is the perfecto and figurado, because it starts small, grows with the ring size, and finishes as majestic as it started. It also cools down towards the end, which keeps it from burning your lips. Of all the Mi Amor cigars I've smoked, the most flavorful and satisfying is the mighty Belicoso.
