but I've also smoked a few 10+ years aged CC that were disappointing...

Some of the NC that I really liked fresh, like the Las Calaveras from 2014, did not benefit from aging. They were among the very best cigars I've smoked, but two years later their "wow" diminished. Like some of the Tatuaje Monsters...great when released, but losing some oomph over the years...

Like KOTC, I really liked the aged Camacho Corojos...and Dpnewell's recommended La Perla Habana Morado ORs were also excellent...somehow the dusty/musty flavor married well with the other flavors...but 10 + year old Torano Tributes that were supposedly great cigars when released (didn't smoke cigars at that time) were dusty airballs...

Among the best cigars I had were a 15+ year OpusX Reserva D'Chateau and a 10+ year LGD Small Batch #2...

TG's analysis that cigars/tobacco are similar to wine/grapes sound right: they are organic products that vary from year to year...that's why the consistency of some Fuentes and Padrons over the years is noteworthy..

I also think that circumstances enhance one's enjoyment of cigars...they tend to be better when you are celebrating something with other people, so there's a social aspect to this discussion...enjoying a cigar in solitude and clinically comparing its qualities is a totally different experience...

Do it with grace if you can.

Grace won't even speak to me since...well, let's just say Grace doesn't speak to me anymore...8-[

Yeah, the biatch quit talking to me as well a few years back. Grace left me for some other biatch named Chastity.

It's more like an illusion of consistency. Can't remember who it was specifically, Frank Llaneza possibly, or maybe Manuel Quesada, or maybe a master blender for Habanos that I no longer remember the name of, who described the process in an interview once. It went something like this:

...Because crops change from year to year, even the same varietal will taste slightly different, you create an illusion of consistency by always blending in some tobacco from the year before, and even a little from the year before that. There is no way to truly side-by-side compare a fresh X year to a fresh X+1 year because one of them is now aged and once aging happens, tobacco changes and aging is unpredictable. Experience allows one to take a best guess, but it's just that, a guess. A lot of factors can influence a fresh cigar, aging adds more factors that compound on the former factors, it's not just, say 20 factors plus another 20, it's 20 times 20, now you have 400 possibilities... So the aim is as closely preserve the profile as possible by adding enough of the former years tobacco to create a similar flavor, this gives that illusion of consistency...

I've heard similar from other blenders / line owners.

Fuente and Padron both have huge stockpiles going back years. Carlos Fuente jr said he didn't even know how many barns of tobacco he owned in total when those 8(?) barns went up in flames last year or the year before. I've been to Esteli, Nicaragua where Padron is located, and there are a LOT of yellow buildings spread around that town. Jorge was laughing about it, telling us the story how in the early days, his father, Jose, would paint their buildings yellow because he said it kept the insects away and, even though he (Jorge) doesn't really completely believe that, it became almost a trademark for them, so they have continued the tradition.

When you have these large inventories to pull from, and you aren't dependent on someone else for your tobacco supplies or your processing of tobacco, you have the ability to create this consistency.

Thanks, TG!

TG is a cigar genius...

I can live wif dat