Felipe Gregorio El Pelo De Oro Robusto (Single)

• Length: 127mm
• Ring Gauge: 50
• Flavour: Medium-Full
• Wrapper: Pelo de Oro - Costa Rica
• Binder: Vuelta Abajo 1941 - Costa Rica
• Filler: Pelo de Oro - Peru
• Seed: Ancestral Cuban Pelo de Oro
• Origin: Dominican Republic

Felipe Gregorio El Pelo de Oro Robusto There are tobacco varieties that cigar makers use because they're dependable, plentiful and relatively straightforward to grow. Pelo de Oro isn't one of them. The name translates as “hair of gold”, and it belongs to an old Cuban tobacco variety prized for its flavour but notoriously troublesome to cultivate. Philip G. Wynne has made something of a speciality of these less commonplace tobaccos, growing ancestral Cuban-seed Pelo de Oro in Costa Rica and building this Felipe Gregorio range around it.

The El Pelo de Oro Robusto measures a classic 5 inches by 50 ring gauge, making it a nicely proportioned cigar rather than one of the great drainpipes that seem to turn up increasingly often. The blend is particularly interesting. On the outside is a Costa Rican Pelo de Oro wrapper, underneath sits Costa Rican Vuelta Abajo 1941 binder, and the filler returns to Pelo de Oro, this time grown in Peru. Felipe Gregorio rates the resulting cigar medium to full in strength.

Felipe Gregorio describes the flavour around an unusual sweet-and-savoury combination of almond, sea salt and butterscotch, with the ancestral Cuban-seed tobacco bringing a distinctive aromatic character of its own.

And have a look at the cigar itself. There's very little dressing up here: a pale golden-brown wrapper and a small gold band carrying little more than Felipe Gregorio – Pelo de Oro. Considering the amount of work that has gone into the tobacco, they've shown admirable restraint with the stationery. The Robusto format should suit the blend particularly well, giving that unusual wrapper plenty of influence while retaining enough filler to develop as the cigar progresses. An ancient Cuban seed, grown in Costa Rica, wrapped around Costa Rican binder and Peruvian filler. It has travelled considerably farther than I usually manage in a year.