La Reloba Seleccion Sumatra Robusto Review
This seleccion sports a very nice thick walnut brown wrapper. It’s toothy and oily with a nice sheen. The Foot smells of earthy sweet tobacco with a touch of barnyard. The wrapper is stronger; emanating aromas of earth and leather while still being underlined by a savory barnyard sweetness. The triple cap is unmistaking Pepin and applied with perfeccion. I decided to go with the punch for this based on past experiences. I have had a very high sucess rate on these. You can always count on the Don….Don Jose “Pepin” Garcia or his son, Jamie to reliably deliver a unique full flavored experience time and time again. Although these cigars are produced and owned under the My Father name (Jamie Garcia), I believe his Pops put this blend together but I may be wrong. Either way…whether it was Father or Son or both, this is a winning blend!
Prelight: Sweet leather with a little spice and very high quality tobacco flavors. This one has me drooling!
Fire it up: Immediately this cigar shows you that it isn’t fooling around. There isn’t going to be a ton of build up. It comes out and smacks you right in the mouth. BAMMMM! Body and flavor with warm spice. Real warm spice and a ton of it. A couple of puffs in, some earth, leather and a speck of bitter chocolate start to develop but are still stroooongly accented by a fiesty spice. Yeah baby!!! This is a powerhouse like most Pepin blends and not for the faint of palate. The smoke is balanced well for this flavor profile and the palate is left fairly clean with only a little residual heat from the pepperiness of the tobacco chosen for this blend. There is no acidity in this blend but the body is still there somewhere around medium full.
The retrohale is clean and non-irritating despite being full of spice and nuance. Shortly in some of the spice dies down enough to start letting some of the opther nuances peak through. Now some cedary wood and earthy flavors are taking the front line. In fact about 1/3 of the way into this cigar it starts to mellow out quite a bit and it becomes a very smooth and flavorful the rest of the way. It actually ends a little more mellow than it started but the core flavors were there the whole way.
Mr Garcia has really done it on this one!!! In fact all of the La Reloba Blends that I tried were really good but this one takes the cake for me. My least favorite was the Habana but I still really liked it. The Mexican is very good and unique. Blows Te-Amo out of the universe but then again…even Pepin knew you can’t go all Mexican and wisely only used it for the wrapper. While the body may fall a little short for some folks looking for a little more “POW” in the kisser, I can’t imagine anyone complaining about lack of flavor. This isn’t a really complex cigar but what it does have…..it has in droves and is very satisfying!
Overall: 91
