The July/August issue of Cigar Aficionado was full of interesting content, including a cover story on television personality Guy Fieri, but perhaps the even bigger story was the surprising number of high-scoring cigars, including three smokes that scored 95 points or higher—Classic on our 100-point scale. Of the 72 cigars put through their paces in a blind taste-test, 39 of them achieved a rating of 90 points or more (54.2 percent). Of that number, we pulled the very best of the best for this list.
Every cigar rated by Cigar Aficionado is smoked blind by our panel of editors. The tasting coordinator removes the cigars’ identifying bands and replaces them with plain white, numbered labels before handing them out. Members of the tasting panel have no idea what they are smoking and cigars are evaluated without biases such as price, country of origin and brand.