Innehållsförteckning för May/June 2019 från Cigar Aficionado

For some three centuries, Le Trois Rois has offered travelers a slice of Old European luxury on the banks of the Rhine. Named for Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, the Three Kings offers a level of accommodation that the magi wouldn’t ever have contemplated during their trek to see a boy in manger. The hotel’s hospitality has been enjoyed by the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Elizabeth II, Pablo Picasso, the Empress of Japan, Duke Ellington, The Rolling Stones, Charles Dickens, Jean Paul Sartre and the Dalai Lama. But the less celebrated among us will also treasure this palace of delights for its sybaritic offerings: fine wine and liquor, heavenly cuisine and a dedicated cigar lounge. Chef du Bar Thomas Huhn mixes The Vesper, Knob Creek Old Fashioned and Negronis in…

Better. Longer. Faster. The newest golf balls on the market boast accolades that might remind you of the old TV show “The Six Million Dollar Man.” But the hype is anchored in fact. Golf balls have evolved in huge leaps, and recent tweaks have made good balls even better. The leader of the pack is the Titleist Pro V1, so dominant that every major championship in 2018 was won by a golfer playing this ball, or its (slightly) harder variation, the Pro V1x. The 2019 versions, which appeared in January, boast thinner urethane covers and thicker inner casing layers to increase ball speed. And the cores are stiffer, designed to boost driving distance and add forgiveness while maintaining the ball’s distinctive ability to stick to a green. Another new development:…

Off the back of the eighth tee at the Pebble Beach Golf Links, where the Pacific Ocean and the headland meet just above the teeming waters, an otter floats on its back, banging a rock against an abalone shell. Playful mammals like this one have sought their dinner here for millennia, without regard to who is passing by, just a sand wedge away. For the past century, those visitors have included Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, who have all come this way in search of trophies and championships. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Clint Eastwood, Jack Lemmon and Sean Connery have come this way, too, stars in search of a bauble or two and a few laughs along the way. Amateur players of all calibre,…

Suppose your rich uncle—or distant great grandfather—had been a liquor dealer with the foresight to lay in cases of Bourbon and rye just before Prohibition made them illegal to buy. And then imagine that almost 100 years later, hidden behind bookshelves in his house, you discovered his secret bank vault containing a huge part of that cache. That was the windfall that greeted the heirs of the California builder, banker and liquor merchant Jean-Baptiste Leonis when his secret trove was discovered in 2017. Many would have dipped straight in, but instead these historic pours made it to Christie’s auction house. What happened next made the market stand up and take notice. An auction of the goods in December saw most of the lots attract prices that stunned the experts. Nine…

It’s almost impossible to miss—a giant, 450-foot guitar right off the highway rising out of Hollywood, Florida’s flat landscape like a curvy, rock ’n’ roll colossus. That huge guitar sits on the property of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. It’s part of the casino’s $1.5 billion expansion project and when it’s finished later this year, it will be a giant, guitar-shaped hotel and perhaps the world’s largest monument to rock music. But on March 23, something just as exciting came to the Hard Rock in Hollywood—Cigar Aficionado’s Big Smoke Florida. It’s a cigar-filled evening where cigar fans get to meet the rock stars of the cigar world, and the star-power at Big Smoke celebrations is undeniable. More than 1,000 enthusiasts came to attend, from across the United States…

The familiar advice offered to men who go shopping for new clothing is that you can’t go wrong with navy blue. The problem is you can’t go very far right either. As classic as it is, that color has been standard issue for business uniforms forever, meaning you and everyone sports them. This season, it’s time to promote your mufti to something more daring, while still staying in the same sector of the color wheel. Happily, an ocean of other blue tones awaits. The collection for spring/summer from Stefano Ricci, Florence’s most exclusive menswear maker, is dubbed “man and the sea” with an imaginative palette that flashes cobalt blue, steel blue, gray-magenta blue, sapphire blue and gentian blue—everything, it seems, but navy. The suit silhouette is a trim two-button jacket,…

Unless you’re a high-ranking government official, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get inside the gold vault at Fort Knox, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring a little Fort Knox into your smoking room. Thanks to the vision and engineering acumen of the British company Son & Son, you can now ash your cigar into a gold or silver bar replica so convincing, it will look as though you’ve robbed the Federal Reserve. To attain such a realistic look and feel, Son & Son mills its ashtrays from solid blocks of brass (gold model) or steel (silver) on a computer-controlled machine to recreate the sloping bevels of the bullion shape. An ashtray pattern is machined out of the bottom. It’s then polished with a brushed-silver satin finish or electroplated in 24K…

The sun beats down, punishing green and brown ballfields. The image is every bit as familiar as the strains of meringue and salsa rising from the dusty alleys. It is said that life in the Dominican Republic follows four principles: God, country, liberty and baseball. Not necessarily in that order. Pelota, another word for “baseball,” challenges that pecking order every month of the year. Long after Major League Baseball cedes its summer dominance to brown leaves and chilled air, the crack of ball meeting ash echoes across the verdant fields of this Caribbean country. Some say baseball is in the blood of Dominicans, who may start playing at the age of three. José Ramírez recalls his youth. “This is a juice box,” he says, holding up a small, waxy carton.…

95 ROMEO Y JULIETA FABULOSO (1985) It’s surprising how little this “A”-sized cigar tastes like cedar, seeing how it spent so many years in a cedar box. Instead, this is a nutty, fruity smoke, with light hints of peach tea that transition to more festive, concentrated notes of dried apricot and fig paste. There’s some lavender on the mid-palate that plays off the nutty foundation of almonds and hazelnuts. At more than nine inches long, the Fabuloso is easily a two-hour smoke. —Gregory Mottola 97 QUAI IMPERIALES D’ORSAY (1986) This is a spectacular, well-aged Churchill with a beautiful, brownish-red wrapper. The burn and draw are absolutely perfect. At the outset, there’s a touch of light, bitter cocoa and earthiness on the front of the palate, and then as it warms…

When major winner Graeme McDowell pulled his golf cart up to the first tee at Old Palm Golf Club, he reached into his bag and pulled out two handmade cigars. Then he smiled as he saw the La Flor Dominicana booth, realizing he had brought coals to Newcastle. There would be no need for your own cigars on this day. It was the 11th annual Els for Autism Pro-Am, sponsored by Cigar Aficionado and Wine Spectator magazines, and the cigars were free-flowing. McDowell soon lit up, joining his four cigar-loving playing partners: radio star Rush Limbaugh, Fox News anchor Brett Baier, former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and the most ardent cigar smoker of all, Cigar Aficionado editor and publisher Marvin R. Shanken, who created the Pro-Am with…

In the 20 years since BMW launched the X5, one of the original European luxury SUVs, it has filled in most of the remaining white space with products ranging from the X1 to X6. The one gap—a full-size, three-row “ute” that could serve as a counterpoint to BMW’s traditional flagship, the 7-Series—has just been plugged by the X7. While at first glance you notice the imposing presence, it would be a mistake to think of the X7 as little more than a stretched version of the familiar X5. Yes, it’s nine inches longer—nearly the size of the Cadillac Escalade or Lincoln Navigator—and boasts the largest-ever application of the familiar BMW double-kidney grille. But the X7 is also loaded with the sort of ultra-premium features you’d expect on a 7-Series—or the…

PAUL GIAMATTI stood on a movie set, surrounded by hundreds of extras, most of them made up to look like talking monkeys, just like he was. And at that moment, he knew he’d made it. “As a kid, if you’d told me I was going to be in a Planet of the Apes movie, I would have felt like the most powerful human being on Earth,” Giamatti says, his eyes brightening as he thinks back to Tim Burton’s multimillion-dollar 2001 remake. “Then I got paid, and I thought, ‘If I can keep working like this, I’m going to be OK.’” Now 51, Giamatti is more than OK: He has flourished, in an almost-30-year career that has included Emmy and Golden Globe awards, along with nominations for an Oscar and a…

Sometimes the smoke of a cigar has the uncanny ability to mimic other pleasant gustatory experiences so well, the cigar is actually transporting. This was the case for the Room101 Farce It Is a Lonsdale, which scored 94 points. Every puff of this slender cigar recalls one comforting food memory or aroma after the next in a warm and resonant way. If the quirky name has you scratching your head, it’s because it came from the creative mind of Matt Booth who owns the brand and brings a bit of madcap humor into the cigar industry. Made with a five-country blend, the cigar is rolled in the Dominican Republic at the William Ventura factory. Two cigars scored 92 points, one from Nicaragua and the other from the United States. Black…

You’d think the largest cigar factory in the Dominican Republic—perhaps the largest in the world—would have at least a bit of ornamentation on its façade: A series of arches to underscore importance. Columns to project power. Or maybe even decorative ironwork to show prosperity. But Tabacalera de Garcia, located just outside the Casa de Campo resort complex of La Romana, Dominican Republic, doesn’t boast any particular architectural style. The exterior is as nondescript and free of affect as any building you’d find in an industrial park in the United States. If not for the sign outside the security gate, you’d have no idea that you were standing in front of one of the most important cigar operations in the world. “Earthquakes,” says Javier Elmudesi as he walks past some workers…

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