Black label Salvation (English)

Black label

Salvation

I tasted this cigar as soon as it was put on the Belgian market, and I really enjoyed it. And I note with horror, that several months later, I still have not written an article about it!

As its creator, James Brown explained to us during his Belgian visit, it is certainly the mildest cigar of its creation. If you are familiar with Black Label, you can imagine that this does not make Salvation a light cigar.

I obviously have a particular packaging. To explain this one, you must know that in addition to producing cigars, James is an artist and it is him who takes care of the design of his rings that he chooses, invents and conceives in connection with his travels, his family, his works...

For this cigar with the sweet name of Le Salut, which is one of his first blends from 2013 when Black Label Trading Co was founded, he based it on a piece of art he made in 2012. It incidentally hangs in their factory and reminds them of where it all began.

So I have in front of me a cigar with a well oiled wrapper; beautiful veins run through it and it is highlighted by two black and silver rings.

The first one is James' work: two joined hands holding a rosary. They are tattooed (we can see the logo of Black Label as well as other signs certainly in connection with James and / or Angela). The cross that hangs from the rosary looks more like an Occitan cross than a Christian one, but it could also be a Maltese cross. Under the hands, there are three roses.

I practice my cut and light ritual. Cold, I'm surprised by this freshly mown grass flavor (thankfully my allergies don't kick in here), white pepper and milk chocolate round out the palette.

The ignition is perfect.

A beautiful smoke quickly fills the room, I am in white pepper, cedar, caramel before the black pepper takes place in this mixture.

The draw is very good and the fun is there. The medium level strength from the start rises to titillate the medium-strong.

I pause slightly in my description to point out that I shared one of my tastings with a Malheur blonde beer and I found this pairing not bad at all: the citrus and its strength made the beer hold up to the cigar without taking over or changing my impressions.

My vitola moves toward California chili (medium-strong chili) and molasses, with a push of red pepper to move back toward blueberries, toast and vanilla.

My tasting is very pleasant and even if I don't take off, I travel in the gustatory memories with a beautiful widened palette.

And then it's the explosion, my cigar goes into centrifuge mode to give me a perfect balanced complexity, all the flavors now make a homogeneous block and the power goes up another notch.

I'm almost at the beautiful death of my cigar when I realize that in no way did I have any bitterness or too much heat effect.

A good 70 min later, I put a small cigar butt (smoking more would have been a risk of mustache fire) in the ashtray for his little death before joining the Mother Earth.

The tastings of the order of 5, were carried on 3 Robusto & 2 Toro, of respectively 12.7 cm for a cepo of 54, and 15.24 cm for a cepo of 52.

 

Wrapper : Habano (Ecuador)

Binder : Honduras

Filler : Nicaragua

 

In conclusion: Another cigar that is regularly in my humidors, and as already said, beware! The less strong of James does not mean light. A cigar to be taken gently and calmly to fully enjoy its range of flavors.

Thank you Angela for the additional explanations on the ring and the name.

Price at the time of writing: 14.40€ for the two modules.