The La Flor Dominicana Salomon – A New, Powerful Figurado

The La Flor Dominicana brand has a new size, and it’s a powerhouse.

The boutique Dominican cigarmaker has added the full-sized, full-flavored La Flor Dominicana Salomon to its lineup. The 7 inch long, 64 ring gauge cigar, which has the same label as the company’s Ligero line but does not have the word “ligero” on its box or band, went on sale in limited fashion in December. The next shipment is coming in March.

The cigars are made from a blend of fill­er and binder leaves grown in La Canela, Dominican Republic. The cigars’ consid­erable strength is due to their being made only with upper priming tobaccos, the strongest on the plant.

“They’re made with the corona leaves,” said Litto Gomez, the cigarmaker behind the brand, speaking of the highest leaves on a tobacco plant. “They’ve been aging forever. The flavor is so mature.”

Compounding the time it takes for the raw components to be ready to roll into cigars is the shape itself: the few rollers capable of making the difficult size, which has a pointed head, a tapered foot and several curves, can create only 60 Salomons per day. A roller making a typical shape, such as a robusto, makes 200 cigars in a day.

The wrapper is sun grown (although it has the supple look of shade) from a Nicaraguan farmer Gomez would not disclose. “I wish I had tons of it,” Gomez said. “The way it blends with our tobacco is incredible.”

Nicaraguan wrapper tobacco has historically com­bined quite well with the type of Cuban-seed tobaccos that Gomez grows in La Canela—he uses Nicaraguan leaf to cover his Coronado by La Flor Double Corona, Cigar Aficionado’s No. 2 cigar of 2006. Gomez has a farm that he co-owns with Jochi Blanco, plus another property next door that’s his alone.

Gomez, who smokes cigars all day long, also said that the cigar packs a punch even for him. “When I smoke a whole one,” he said, “it makes me light-headed.”

The La Flor Domincana Salomon comes in huge wooden boxes that are 18 inches wide at their feet, displaying 10 cigars arrayed in a fan pattern, closer at the head, wider at the foot. Each cigar has a suggested retail price of $23.