The Arturo Fuente Don Carlos line has evolved into a special cigar family created to honor a legendary, larger-than-life figure — late company patriarch Don Carlos Fuente Senior, who sadly left the material world in 2016.
His passing ended an era at Arturo Fuente, elevating his son Don “Carlito” Junior to Carlito’s current role as head of the Fuente empire, but the humble spirit and wisdom of Don Carlos lives on to watch over the company and the cigar industry as a whole.
This torpedo-shaped smoke — the Belicoso vitola of the line named after Don Carlos (and blended by him personally, in concert with Carlito and Central African tobacco grower Rick Meerapfel) — makes use of some of the finest tobaccos grown in the mineral-rich soils of the Dominican Republic. Aged for as long as 10 years, they’re sealed with a Dominican binder and surrounded by a flawless Cameroonian wrapper, resulting in sublime, flavorful, medium-strength sticks that balance the tangy, sweet-and-sour properties of the African wrappers with the nutty, zesty qualities of the fillers. Nuances of candied orange peel, vanilla beans, graham crackers, cinnamon and brown sugar infuse themselves within the cigar’s aromatic extracts, alongside constituent earthy and leathery notes.
The near-perfect dimensions, ratios and burn rate of the Belicoso vitola led Cigar Aficionado to assign it a 94 rating and rank it fourth in the magazine’s Top 25 Cigars of the Year list in 2015. The Don Carlos line in its entirety is even more esteemed, scoring a nearly unimaginable 97 rating in 2017 (the highest rating for an Arturo Fuente stick — only four cigars have ever scored higher, and two were rolled in the 1950s) and rating 90 or above an unprecedented 65 times, ranking in the CA Top 25 list no less than seven times since the publication was founded.
If you’re seeking to acquire a handful of Arturo Fuente’s best cigars, you’re looking at them. Buy a box today, and discover what made Don Carlos the enduring, everlasting legend he is.