Rocky Patel Vintage 1999 Churchill

Starting out as an entertainment lawyer and slowly making the transition into cigar maker, Rocky Patel not only made it through the cigar boom of the 1990s but has settled into being one of the most renowned cigar makers around. The Rocky Patel Vintage 1999 is the third installment of the unparalleled success of the Vintage line, and has ratings of 90+. Unlike its counterparts from the same line, the ’99 Vintage isn’t boxed pressed and features a white and gold band. The Vintage 1999 is hand-rolled in Honduras and starts with a silky Connecticut shade wrapper that hugs a superb award winning blend of eight year old Nicaraguan and Dominican long-leaf ligeros as well as a Nicaraguan binder also aged eight years. This slightly spicy yet mild blend has hearty and creamy notes of earth, butter, and toasted wood. Try it with a dark rum.

Honduras has been a tobacco growing and cigar manufacturing area for hundreds of years, but it was the Communist revolution in Cuba that really put Honduras on the map. In the 1960s, many Cuban cigar makers fled their homeland and arrived in Honduras to re-establish their way of life. The immigrants took advantage of the climate, soil, and geography, which were well-suited to tobacco growing, and began producing high quality cigars. The center of the Honduran cigar industry is the city of Danli and the nearby Jamastran Valley. The majority of the world’s pure Corojo tobacco is grown here, now that Cuba has stopped production of this iconic, spicy, and rich variety in favor of Corojo hybrids. Other important areas of Honduran cigar production include the Talanga Valley, Copan, and Trojes.