Wrapper: Ecuadorian Sumatra

Binder: Connecticut Broadleaf

Filler: Dominican, Nicaraguan, Peruvian

Size: 5 x 52 Robusto

Body: Medium/Full

Price: $10.00

This is a premium cigar few have heard of. It’s not carried by a lot of stores. And it ain’t cheap. My robusto was $10 a pop. Actually, a bit under as I bought a 5 pack. If they don’t give them to me, I have to buy them.

The Jose Seijas Signature looks like one of the great redwood trees in Northern California. It has a gorgeous reddish hue on top of a medium brown milk chocolate.

The band is simple and classy all white band with gold writing, including Seijas’ autograph.

The wrapper changes colors in the light like a chameleon…lots of dark mottling. And it has a beautifully done triple cap. The stick is very toothy and has a nice oily sheen.

I do the sniff and detect trucks full of cocoa. At the foot, it’s a Milky Way bar. There is the obligatory cedar aroma. But there is another aroma at the foot: apricots. Tart and sweet. It is friggin’ enticing. It reminds me of those cheap boxes of Xmas chocolate dipped apricots.

I punch the cap with my Montecristo pen. I love this pen as the blades remain sharp forever. And I light ‘er up.

I get a Garcia-like blast of red pepper. The draw is perfect and smoke pours from the foot. The char line starts out perfect.

The cocoa aroma translates to the cocoa flavor immediately. There is some sweet cedar as well. The cigar has a dark earthiness to it.

The body is at the low side of medium. The ash is close to complete white with flecks of black. The spiciness tamps down a bit but is not shy.

The flavor of coffee enters. A sweet foamy coffee. A Java Mocha Latte.

I read one review and he said he could taste licorice. So I am looking out for that but so far, no go.

An inch in, and this cigar is beautifully balanced. You are getting every dime’s worth of your money on this stick. This is a real treat.

The char line begins to do the funk-a-delic and I wonder if I will have to fix it.

I was hoping to taste the apricot but I don’t. I can taste something sweet and fruity but not my beloved apricot.

After 15 minutes, I haven’t passed the 1” point. Remarkable. As what’s his name of The Little Rascals used to say.

As the first third ends, cocoa is engulfing me. And then some creaminess raises its lovely head. But there is something different here than your usual cocoa and creaminess combo that are in so many cigars. The earthiness gives it a very deep richness. It’s like taking a bite from an aged Kobe beef steak. Your eyes roll up and you think you’ve died and gone to heaven. That element is here.

The spiciness stays at the same moderate level and I can’t figure out the light fruity flavor. Still not apricot.

The halfway point is where the cigar takes off. It is a flavor explosion. I run to the fridge for my Diet Coke. The cocoa is the most intense of any cigar I’ve smoked. The creaminess keeps up. The spice is beginning to ramp up. The richness is so thick; you can cut it with a knife. The sweet component is marvelous. I don’t want this to stop.

I now taste anise. The other guy was right. (That’s anise, not anus.)

I am into the last third which is a dream. The cigar is beginning to remind me of the Paul Stulac White Blinding Light…just a little. The overall flavor profile is similar. And I love all the Stulac blends.

I’m beginning to get apricot. Woo Hoo! It is very mild but I can taste that tart/sweet combo.

The flavor profile becomes even more intense. This is some cigar. The apricot flavor becomes more prevalent as the cigar burns down. The spiciness really gets into 5^th gear in this part of the cigar and the strength increases to full body.

If you like heavily complex cigars and full flavored cigars, then this is your baby.

And now for something completely different:

“No. You can’t jump out of an airplane. What if you get hurt? Who is going to handle your 20 projects? Only you know what’s going on with them.”

That was the owner of the company I worked for in Fremont, CA. This guy had more money than God. He owned dozens of businesses and rarely showed up at the structural steel shop I worked at.

“Fuck’m.”

I jumped 20 times when I was 30. I can do it again at 51. Only due to the lapse, I did a tandem jump. Otherwise, it was 8 hours or training. No thank you.

So off we went to 19,000 feet. Jesus Alou and Manny Mota. I was first out of the plane. And I had to listen to my jumping partner brag about himself the whole 15 minutes it took to get to that height. Blah, blah, blah.

Out we went with a perfect jump. We tumble a few times; which is a real rush. And then we spread eagle into the flying or falling formation. I paid extra for a camera man to jump with us to capture everything.

I had asked to do the “bullet” fall for a few seconds. That’s where you point your bodies downward like a bomb and pick up speed. We were already going 235mph because there were two of us. Normally, it’s only around 135mph for one person…so the ground comes up fast, even at 19,000 feet.

The bullet was pure adrenaline. I was told to keep my mouth shut because air would fill my mouth and make me look like a big puffer fish. I didn’t care. I opened my mouth. And laughed hard for the camera. I can’t remember how long the free fall lasted.

Around 2000 feet, I pulled the rip cord. And the power of the halting mechanism of physics caused my head to snap backwards and clock my buddy smack in the jaw, knocking him out…which I did not find out until after we landed.

So we came in way too fast. No one was controlling the cords. No one was slowing us down. A couple hundred feet up, I grabbed the cords and we tilted forward ramming me head first into the ground at about 40mph. And the good news is that they talked me out of wearing a helmet for the video. We dug a 15’-0 trench. With him on top of me, it was like an NFL tackle.

I felt my spine snap, crackle and pop as we moved along the ground, burying me in the soft loamy earth. I finally disappeared underneath the dirt until all you could see was my buddy laying on the ground on top of my invisible body. He woke up and rolled over, pulling me on top of him. I was out cold and my body looked dead. And then “Click,” the video was turned off.

The doctors that have seen the video all said that any faster, or one degree up or down, might have paralyzed me or killed me. I was told over and over, “You only get one of those, son.”

So now, the structural damage to my body is so horrendous, that surgery is impossible. And I live with chronic pain. That one little jump changed my life for good.

My earlier 20 jumps were a dream. But skydiving is dangerous. And anything can happen at any moment. So get out there and fall out of an airplane.

Categories: CIGAR REVIEWS