| ring: | 42 (medium) |
| length: | 129mm |
| beginners: | okay, mild enough |
| price: | $13.95AUD |
| summary: | mild flavours, pleasant, but doesn't stand out |
Romeo y Julieta’s most common “modestly priced” cigars, the Romeo No.1, Romeo No.2 and Romeo No.3, all come in white and red styled tubos and are easily found in tobacconists, bars and bottle-shops throughout Australia. Of the three, the mid-priced and mid-sized offering, the Romeo No.2 is generally the most highly regarded.
My first experience with this cigar was not a good one, as the tobacconist had kept it in far too humid conditions and I hadn’t thought to check his humidor settings. That single was simply unsmokable. Upon return I noticed the dial on his hygrometer was reading way up around the ninety mark … a good twenty percent higher than it should have been!
For my second attempt, I purchased the cigar from a different vendor. Incidentally, his hygrometer reading was slightly low: around sixty two, but I left the cigar to sit in my personal humidor for a week in ideal conditions before firing it up tonight.
Lesson learned: always check the vendor’s hygrometer before purchasing! (It should read somewhere between sixty-five and about seventy-two.)
An attractive, medium-sized cigar, the Romeo No.2 has a mid-brown wrapper with some minor veins, but not enough to impact negatively on an otherwise neat appearance. It has a mildly aromatic and slightly savoury aroma. The band is a stylish deep-red, white and gold.
Unlike my first attempt at the stogie, this one lit easily and stayed alight for the entire smoke with no problems. The ash was a little flaky for the first quarter but became stronger afterwards.
The smoke was surprisingly mild and very smooth with a touch of sweetness. The first half of the cigar was a little salty with savoury and herbal flavours; these faded and were replaced by a pleasant, sweet nuttiness in the second half. For the last third, the sweetness intensified and I also detected some slight coffee undertones.
Not an bad experience by any stretch; however, that paragraph probably makes the cigar sound a lot more inviting than what it really deserves. The problem is that these flavours were very placid, and the nicer ones only seemed to really come through in the last third of the smoke. The herbal characteristics were a bit take-it-or-leave-it, and the sweet coffee flavours that appeared towards the end were only very slight.
Even though I can’t really single out any defining negative characteristic, I just found the whole experience was a little bit “ho hum”.
That much being said, this is not a bad cigar, and it might just suite your tastes perfectly. I’m a bit torn between giving this a 5 or a 6 … it’s a tad better than a 5, but not quite a 6 either. (On the BigRedCigar.com scoreboard, a 5 is not a bad score, it means it’s average: not exceptional, but not at all bad either.)