Rocky Patel Ships $100 Conviction Along With Dark Star
Two of Rocky Patel’s newest brands have arrived at retail shops, and one of them is the most expensive cigar he’s ever made. Rocky Patel Dark Star and Rocky Patel Conviction started appearing in cigar shops around 10 days ago.
Conviction is a one-size line with a price tag of $100 per cigar. It’s not only presented in extraordinary packaging but Patel says it is made with the oldest tobaccos in his inventory. Inside the smoke are leaves grown on his own farms in Nicaragua, including some exceptionally old tobaccos from his maiden crop. “We started growing tobacco in 2014,” he says. “It’s got our oldest filler from both the farms in it.”
Conviction is primarily Nicaraguan, with Condega and Estelí fillers and a Jalapa binder. The wrapper is a high-priming leaf from Mexico’s San Andrés Valley. It comes in one size, a box-pressed Toro measuring 6 1/2 inches by 52 ring gauge. There are 10 cigars per box.
Dark Star, which is also in shops now, is rolled in Honduras, and contains a fairly unusual ingredient in the tobacco blend—a bit of tobacco grown in Honduras from a seed that originated in Paraguay.
That Paraguayan-seed leaf is one part of the filler blend, which also includes tobacco from the Jamastran Valley of Honduras and the Jalapa region of Nicaragua. The binder is Mexican San Andrés, while the Corojo-seed wrapper was grown in Honduras.
Dark Star comes in four sizes, three of them traditional and one that’s fairly unusual: Robusto (5 1/2 by 50 with a suggested retail price of $10.50); a Toro (6 by 52, $11.50); Sixty (6 by 60, $12.50) and the extra-pudgy Short Star, which is 4 by 60 and retails for $11.25.
Look for a blind tasting of both brands in issues of Cigar Insider.
