Cigar Review: Nestor Miranda Collection One Life Edition Danno Maduro

This special limited edition from Miami Cigar & Co.—one of three released this year—is unmistakably maduro. From the deep rich coffee and chocolate aroma of its Broadleaf wrapper to the sweetness in the smoke, this large cigar stands out.

At 7 inches in length and a 56 ring gauge, the Danno cigars are not spur-of-the-moment smokes. I clocked about two hours with each of the two I sampled.

What you get in that time is a medium-strength cigar with balanced flavors and a light finish. Problems sometimes encountered with large cigars—especially with the burn and the draw—were non-existent. My only complaint was smoke production: I’d have liked a little more.

With the first one, I began with a V-cut at the foot, which sports a small pigtail. After a half-inch or so, I used a guillotine to open it up in hopes of getting more smoke. And that helped some, as it did for the second cigar, when I simply started with the straight cut.

The cigar begins with notes of spice, which give way fairly soon to some of the typical dark maduro flavors like coffee and cocoa. They remain throughout, with the second half becoming sweet, with a taste sometimes reminiscent of burned sugar.

The maduro edition of the 2015 Danno line, named to commemorate Nestor Miranda’s late son, has Nicaraguan, Dominican, and Peruvian filler tobaccos with the Nicaraguan Criollo ’98 binder common to all three. The MSRP is $12, more than reasonable considering the size.

Miami Cigar, which supplied my samples, produced only 1,000 20-count boxes of each of the three at the My Father Cigars factory in Nicaragua.

I don’t smoke a lot of maduro cigars. Too often, I’ve found a sameness in many of them that can lead to a fairly boring smoke.

That wasn’t the case with the Danno Maduro. It has distinct flavors and remains interesting, though, honestly, I probably would have liked it better in a somewhat smaller vitola.

Overall, I preferred the Habano, which I reviewed in June. The Connecticut review is coming up.

The Nestor Miranda Danno Collection One Life Edition Maduro is a fine smoke. I rate it four stogies out of five.

[To read more StogieGuys.com cigar reviews, please click here.]

–George E

photo credit: Stogie Guys