I recently asked for my readers’ help in making up my mind on which cigar would be my 100th cigar review on Matt’s Cigar Journal and the verdict is in!  I have to say…

You guys are no help at all!! Really! I post my very first poll on this blog and we end up with a virtual tie. The Tatuaje Black did come out a couple votes ahead but the truth is, the vote is pretty well split down the middle (or in thirds in this case). There isn’t an overwhelming winner in this thing. I guess that means I picked three pretty damn good cigars as the candidates for my 100th review. It is funny because the results of this poll mirror the struggle going on inside my head trying to decide on this thing. The Tatuaje Black has always been the sentimental favorite in my mind, but the other two certainly demanded serious consideration. It appears the collective consciousness of my readership closely mirrors my own mind. A scary thought for all of us except that I will assume the affinity only relates to this one specific topic. Good news for the rest of you, lol. I wasn’t going to declare my intentions at the closing of the poll, but I have made up my mind and so I figure I should just spit it out already.

The Tatuaje (Black Label) Private Reserve will be the 100th Cigar Review on Matt’s Cigar Journal. Look for it on January 1st as that review will kick off the new year of what promises to be a another good one filled with great new cigars to try and enjoy.  Thank you to all those that voted, and thanks for taking the time to visit my little corner of the Internet.

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… and my very first poll.

It took a while to get there but a little over three years after starting this blog  I am just a couple posts away from my 100th cigar review.  I realize this is not necessarily an impressive pace,  but I am a one man show.   I smoked and reviewed all 100 cigars myself.  No partners or guest reviewers helping to shoulder the burden.  It’s a dirty job and I enjoy being the one to do it.   Of course, I am taking some liberties with the term “review” here, especially in regards to my posts early on.  Back when I first started I am not sure you could call what I was posting a “review” but for my purposes they are.

Being the 100th review, it is a significant milestone at least in my mind.  Given that fact, I feel a special cigar is called for here.  I have struggled a bit with how to go about choosing the cigar for my 100th review.  I haven’t posted a review on a Tatuaje Black Label yet and given how Tatuajes are my favorite cigars, I am thinking it would be a good choice.  But I also think that perhaps this milestone is bigger than that.  Perhaps it calls for a cigar that is legendary in the world of cigars.  A Cohiba Robusto comes immediately to mind (Cuban of course).  Another option is a special, super expensive, limited edition cigar.  At the top of that list would be the Padron 80th Anniversary cigar.  I am having a tough time making up my mind so I have posted my very first poll on the blog and I am going to look to my readers for help.  I expect to see all 5 of you vote…  LOL.  I am not saying that the results of the poll are what I will ultimately go with for my 100th review, but the feedback will be taken into serious consideration.  So go ahead and vote, and thanks for the help!

With the holidays fast approaching and all of the associated activities that will compete for my time, I plan to make the 100th review my first review of the new year.  I’ll let this poll run for a few weeks and you’ll see the results as you vote.  I won’t announce my final decision though.  You’ll find out what I went with when you see the review posted in 2009.  Thanks again.

-Matt

P.S. I also just realized that this post marks another minor milestone for my blog. This post is the 200th post on Matt’s Cigar Journal. It’s a month of milestones around here.

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I am sure it is obvious by now that I have been MIA with the posts on the blog.  Work and home life are in their busiest seasons right now severely limiting my opportunities to sit and enjoy a smoke.  On top of that, I am an allergy sufferer and we are now in the midst of a change of seasons.  As my fellow allergy sufferers can probably attest to, a change of seasons reeks havoc on the sinuses and my respiratory system has not been right for the past week.  To make matters worse, now I have a sinus infection.

To make a long story short, although it looks as if I have disappeared, I am in fact still around and I plan to get back to posting reviews as soon as my time and my sinuses allow.

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Today I posted a brand new Welcome page. The old Welcome page was the very first post on the blog and being over three years old it is a bit dated. A new edition was in order. You can access the page be either clicking the cigar painting to the left or the word “Welcome” underneath it. This Welcome page is serving double duty. I am treating it as my “About Me” page as well.

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Well August has rolled around again.  For the few who are regular readers of my blog (thanks mom and dad… haha), you know that around August each year I take a little break from smoking cigars.  I attempted to explain why last year.  This year I actually have a pretty good reason, not that I was looking for one.

I am training to run a 10K at the end of August and a 5k in September.  The 10K is a run I am going to do on my own as part of the Nike+ Human Race 10k that takes place globally on August 31st.  This 10k is a real event in 25 cities around the world, but if you are a runner and have a Nike+ armband or iPod kit you can run a 10k on the 31st where ever you’d like and just upload your Nike+ data after your run.  Seemed like a cool idea to me so I figured I’d take part. The 5k is an actual event I plan to attend and participate in.  There are a couple 5k races in the Raleigh area in September.  I just need to decide which one I want to run in.  I am doing this just as a personal competition to push myself and get some exercise.

Anyway, I will still be posting in August, just not cigar reviews.  I will take this time to rework my Welcome page, create an About Me page and possibly some other pages like my Top 10 Smokes or some other kind of feature page.  We’ll see what I come up with…

I post about my progress with my running on my running blog. I keep that blog solely as a focus and motivation tool so it isn’t terribly interesting, but if you’re interested to see how I’m doing, click the Nike+ picture above.

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Today marks the three year anniversary of my little blog here. I started back in 2005. At that time I had it hosted on Blogger and moved it to WordPress a little over a year ago. This milestone had me clicking through a lot of my old posts. It is kind of funny looking back. It illustrates just how much my taste in cigars have changed over the years. Besides my tastes maturing and changing, so has my philosophy on cigars. The things that are important to me in terms of cigars has changed a great deal as well. I am also able to see how my writing has improved over the years. My reviews have gotten a lot better in terms of content and style and I have also gotten better at describing my experiences and the flavors I detect. That said, I still think I am a bit of an amateur in that department, but a better amateur than before (LOL). Given how much I have changed over the years, it has me thinking it is time to write a new “Welcome” page as well as a new “About Me” page with more current information. Look for those in the near future. So to wrap this entry up…

Happy 3rd Anniversary Matt’s Cigar Journal!

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Lucky7 and Cigarfan over at The Keepers of the Flame have recently honored me with an invitation to participate is a great project that they are undertaking, and it is a huge undertaking. They are putting together a vertical tasting of the entire Padron Series of cigars. They are calling it the Padron Series Roundup and together with a collection of reviewers from the cigar blogging community, they will be compiling tasting notes on every size offered in the Padron Series line in both the natural and maduro wrappers. I have been called upon to cover the #3000 natural and maduro in this line and I will also be contributing to the tasting notes on the Ambassador as well. This project will span the next 2+ months so be sure to check out The Keepers of the Flame periodically for the full reviews, and I’ll be posting some updates about the project along the way as well.

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I just wanted to give everyone a sneak peek into what the upcoming reviews will be in the next several months…

(Click to Enlarge)

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It was one year ago today that I moved my humble little blog over to WordPress. I have to say I have been extremely satisfied with the decision. WordPress is an excellent content management system and I think my blog is much better now than it ever could have been before the move. Thank you very much WordPress, for the wonderful home you provide for my little blog.

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I, being a man of questionable judgment, take a voluntary break from smoking cigars at least once a year.  I usually do this around July or August and the break lasts about 30 days.  I have talked about this break before here.  This year, I have had an unplanned and involuntary break thrust upon me by an almost comical and unbelievable series of maladies that have befallen me.  I owe a big thanks to my children and the daycare they attend for this unwelcome hiatus.  It started in mid November and has stretched up to this day and I am still not well enough to have a smoke.  First I was hit with a small cold that developed into one of the worst and most painful sinus infections I have ever had.  No sooner did I start to get over that before my son brought home a lovely little GI bug that had me dry heaving for hours after my stomach finally emptied.  The effect of that bug lingered in the form of an annoying but seemingly harmless cough.  Harmless that is until it turned into a case of bronchitis that has been having me coughing up a lung for the past two weeks.  I feel like I am finally on the up swing, but am still coughing pretty regularly.  Thanks to some cough syrup with Vicodin that the doc gave me, I am at least getting some good sleep.

Anyway, this month long battle with illness has gotten me way behind on cigar reviews.  Both the reviews I’ve committed to for CigarsDirect.com and the cigars I wanted to review from my own collection.  On the bright side of all this, once I am able to smoke again, I have a line up of what should be some stellar cigars to smoke.

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I decided I had enough reviews up now that it was worth putting together an index of them.  There is a link for the Cigar Review Index on the sidebar to the left.

On a side note it was interesting to see how my writing has evolved and how I go about reviewing the cigars has changed.  When I started I was just writing fairly general impressions much like I did in my pen and paper journal that this blog replaced.  As time went on I started to get more detailed and my entires started to look more like actual reviews.  I’m still just a regular Joe giving a regular Joe’s take on cigars, and I am by no means a great (or even good) writer but I have really enjoyed keeping up this blog.  I hope I can continue to improve my writing and my reviews to hopefully make them even more useful to those looking to try something new.  Another aspect of putting together this index is seeing how my tastes and opinions have changed as my palate developed and I became a more experienced cigar smoker.  Some of my earlier entries are difficult for me to read now.  Some of them make me cringe as I read them.

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