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Perdomo "Reserve 10th Anniversary Sun-Grown"

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Initial Smoke

Spanish cedar sure can be spicy when it hits the nose just right, and with this blend, it decides to serve up a roundhouse right to the snout almost immediately upon light. Focusing upon the flavors found on the tongue returns a second round of raw biscuit dough, popcorn with butter soon to follow, and a sweet, grassy bed for it all to sprawl across. As the spicier cedar scents retract their splintered claws, a sense of balance is achieved, and the cigar smells, tastes, and feels damn near perfect.

1st Half

Biscuits baking in the oven, and a pot of warm honey sitting on the stove, a flurry of kitchen activities begins to take place as the first sizable section of the cigar ignites. All of the buttered popcorn tastes from prior are still popping, and are slowly becoming saltier and chewier as they heat up. Speaking of heat, the spicier cedar notes from retrohales have moved toward the tongue and tempt the taste buds with a crackling good time.

Simple yet effective, the move into the second third shifts to a more mineral sort of salt flavor, which makes the popcorn flavors taste almost like they have been dusted with some form of gourmet herb salt. The blend is more buttery than before, and as the sweetness from earlier slowly fades, the sappier sides of the Spanish cedar start to shine. This takes aromatics off the cigar to a level that exceeds expectations, and if it were not for a touch of sulfur in the air, it would be near-perfect in regard to aroma. 

As for performance and smoke quality, everything is moving toward medium by this point, with draw flow and the size of the ash that has built being the only full-sized sections of the stogie.

2nd Half

Although it feels like the blend is favoring a stronger approach than one that is mild, the overall effervescence found within the smoke itself keeps the cigar on the sunny side of the street. Not even the nuttier, saltier, spicier, and soil-strong sides of that all-Nicaraguan internal team can sway that wrapper from its intended mission, and here you may find your toes curling a touch.

Crazy creamy in texture and taste, the smoke that swirls about is a milky delight, and tastes both dessert-like and outdoorsy all at once. As sweet honey notes hit on a secondary level, coating whipped cream in their sticky goodness, along come some strands of straw and dried clay. The finish is longer and stronger, and the overall vibe of the blend is way more than mild, which could be either a turn-off or a turn-on for those of you reading this.

Parting Puffs

Ah yes, the dreaded last dozen minutes of the cigar, where the blend either delights and surprises the senses, or flutters and falls flat on its face in a smoldering wad of singed tobacco leaf. For me, I find that the parting puffs on the Reserve 10th Anniversary Champagne fall under the latter of the lot more often than not, with a mixture of pithy citrus, bitter burnt toast, chalky soil, blackboard chalk, and a peppery bite being the chief offenders.

Ash / Burn / Smoke / Draw

On the bright side, this version of the 10th Anniversary continues to burn brilliantly every time. In fact, I cannot recall a single time when I have had to do anything beyond a minor burn correction on this blend. Even with an ash drop in the middle of my review, I found myself smiling at how cleanly this stogie combusts. The ash itself is a beauty, and both carbon rings and burn rates are cool and controlled. This is in stark contrast to the 10th Anniversary Sun-Grown that I reviewed a few weeks prior in gordo form, which was a train wreck from the first third onward.

The smoke's texture is great too, as it offers up a fun little transitional move from light and effervescent to creamy and milky, and then back around again to where it started as you move from section to section. This is aided by a draw that may be borderline too open for some, but at least you know it will always have flow, thanks to Perdomo draw-testing each stick prior to packaging. 

Final Thoughts

By this point, my appreciation for this premium cigar blend has spanned more than two decades. From the cigar shop in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where I worked behind the register, to my current position as Klaro's cigar guinea pig, the Perdomo Reserve 10th Anniversary Champagne has been one of those dependable shade blends I always come back to. It may not be my favorite Connecticut Shade cigar, and I sure as hell have never detected a drop of bourbon inside, but it certainly retains a spot as one of those classic concoctions that still delivers.

But recently, I have found that this smoke is not what it once was, and I wonder how much of that has to do with crop years and the ever-changing weather patterns felt across the globe. Not only were my review cigar and the two sticks I sparked over the course of the past year far less creamy and sweet than the sticks I savored in years past, but they also had some off-flavors that I found quite unpleasant. Sulfur is one of them, with that chalkboard powder note being the other. Mixed with a sharper, harsher escalation toward parting puffs, and I fear that something is a bit amiss with old faithful here.

Now, we must recognize the fact that all three of the cigars that were sent to me for this review were likely pulled from the same box, so with a little luck, the off-flavors I detected were exclusive to that lot. So, yes, I shall be smoking another one of these blends here in the next few months to see if I detect the same flavors.

Either way, I strongly suggest that you leave a review on this blend's product page and let us know what you think, because quality control matters, and both Klaro and the legacy brand that is Perdomo Cigars want to make sure that you, the customer, get the best smoking experience possible. Personally, I would love to see this smoke sing with that creamy sweetness and tangy citrus from start to finish that I remember from a few years ago, and even further back, to my college years, when I first encountered the world's first mass-produced bourbon-barrel-aged cigar.

Overall Balance & Repeatability