David Savona

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Smoking a New Oliva

Posted: 11:24 AM ET, October 08, 2008

Oliva Cigar Co. has been making cigars since 1995, but it really popped up on my radar screen three years ago when I noticed their value-priced cigars scoring well in Cigar Insider and Cigar Aficionado. The one that really caught my interest was a $4.50 robusto called the Oliva “O” Classic Olé. It was named our No. 9 Cigar of the Year in January 2006. You have to love a world-class cigar with a suggested retail price of less than $5.

Oliva has been doing very well lately, and last year the company took the No. 4 slot on our Top 25 with the release of the Oliva Serie V line. Last week, Oliva vice president Jose Oliva came by the Cigar Aficionado office to show me what he calls “the maduro interpretation” of the cigar, the new Oliva Serie V Maduro Especial. It’s made with a Connecticut broadleaf wrapper around Nicaraguan filler and binder, and it’s pretty damn tasty. I shot a little video of the cigar, about ten minutes into the smoke, and had Jose talk about it. Check it out.

Broadleaf takes me back to my roots. Back when I was in college, I smoked Muniemaker Breva 100s, machine-made cigars (100 percent tobacco machine mades, not the type made with a zillion flavorings, the ones that are wrapped with something that looks like brown paper) that were wrapped in dark, rugged broadleaf. So I tend to enjoy the sweet, rugged flavor broadleaf imparts to a cigar.

The Serie V Maduro is excellent. It has some cocoa, coffee bean and raisin flavors, with a lot of spice. I found it delicious. It burned beautifully and was exceptionally well made. I didn’t score it, but it would have done well.

The first Serie V maduros will ship next week. You can read a little more about the cigars in yesterday’s Cigar Insider.

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