McClelland Dominican Glory

Short choppy cuts of light chocolate with a very distinctive cigar aroma. But not a mouthwatering rich brown cigar like the color in the tin, but more like one of those green claros. But that's what the ad copy says and off I went. I'm not much of a cigar buff anymore but I do enjoy one on occasion.

Disastrous is the best word I can use for this. Perhaps that was due to my own misunderstanding but I was thinking this was going to be one of McClellands incomparable Virginias but with a cigar leaf overtone. Yes, there was Virginia tobacco in here but it tasted strictly bottom shelf. With the wealth of high quality Virginia in the McClellands vaults, I was surprised at how dull and flavorless this batch was. The cigar leaf tasted cigar-y to be sure but along with being mild was kind of harsh and King Edwardian ( as with their cigars, more paper than tobacco). It was all very cheap tasting and not refined like most McClelland blends. Up till now, Holiday Spirit was the only McC total failure in my book. I'd rather smoke an entire tin of that one than another single bowl of this. I made it thru only 4 bowls, with varying degrees of moisture content. Nothing saves this from a single star. Makes me definitely wary of the Maduro version and I may hold off on that one for awhile.

I am wrestling with this one. I am finding it hard to review a pipe tobacco that smells like a cigar, tastes like a cigar, has the room note of a cigar, yet smokes in a pipe. And all of the above not a very good cigar.

It is an all brown rough cut tobacco, it is rather mild and non biting, but if I am going to smoke a cigar, I think I will smoke a cigar and a good one. If you favor low end cigars one might like this one. It has a cigar flavor as one might expect, it packs easy and burns easy in the pipe, it burns into cigar colored grey ash all the way down and rather dry so it has that going for it, I just did not really enjoy this blend in my pipe. I have had some good blends with cigar leaf in them and I did enjoy them, but I still felt that I was smoking a pipe, the cigar leaf added character and flavor to the blend. This just tastes like a low end cigar and leaves the room smelling like a cheap cigar. Thus I cannot rate this high either as a pipe blend or even as a decent cigar.

A McClelland disaster!

Another victory in missing the mark. A base of cigar leaf ribbon seasoned with small broken virginia flake with quite a lot of humicant added. Not much flavor comes through, smokes somewhat wet and the virginia flake is so moist that it effectively will not burn. I think I know what they are trying to do, cigar filler tobacco types are actually very bland and dry by nature. Anyone who has experimented with smoking cigar leaf in a pipe has found out. By adding a humicant it makes the cigar leaf more pliable to work with(from being to brittle) and to remove the "dry Bite." But the result is a blend of no refinement and lack of character. This really needs to be reconceptualized for it to be a worthy product.

-Not recommended

What a disappointment Dominician Glory is!. I am a big cigar fan (yeah, I like little cigars, too) and thought that this might be ticket for those times when a quick cigar fix was in order.

Wrong!!!. This stuff seems to bring the worst of the two worlds together. The dominican is flat and bitter, w/o the compensating cigariness. The virginias seemed out of place and just adds a bite that good cigars never seem to have. Cigars are supposed to have a bitter edge but also very rich, full body that DG misses by a mile.

This blend reminds me of really cheap machine-rolled cigars of the drug-store variety. If that is your bent, then you may like this stuff. If, however, you like good hearty long-filler, hand-made Central American cigars, spend your money on those instead.

Oh, yeah, I can't believe that the maduro variety would be much of an improvement.

06/12/2005 If you crave a cigar smell and flavor in the bowl of a pipe here it is...If you want the smell and taste of a good cigar this is not it! Also it is cut like an American Aromatic which makes it burn way too fast. Might be o.k. if it came in a broken flake. 3/23/2006 I keep revisiting this blend hoping to make friends with it. Hasn't happened. I have lowered this rating to one star. Still looking for that blend with a bit of cigar flavor. This blend tastes like it has some paper ground up with it.

If one were to look at the can of Dominican Glory on the shelf at their local B&M they would just think it was a smaller can of Christmas Cheer also distributed by McClelland. But, this blend is something different all together. Upon opening the tin one is greeted with the usual McClelland ?ketchup? aroma. The odor surrounds your sense of smell and taste. However, if you transfer the contents of Dominican Glory from the tin to a jar, leave the jar open for about 1-3 hours, replace the lid and leave it, the ?ketchup? odor will not be near as strong. At first this seems to be a very pleasant blend, and if one were to inhale, it doesn?t choke even choke you as some latakia?s will. The tobacco lights without a problem and one never should have a problem keeping it lit. At about the middle of the bowl you really begin to get sick of this blend. The aroma it gives off is almost unnoticeable and there really isn?t any flavor in the whole bowl. One good thing about the blend is that if you want to really puff on your pipe, try Dominican Glory, because it almost never gets hot, and this reviewer never really noticed any tongue bight. For a person that smokes a cigar as well as a pipe this would be a good choice for them. If you are a cigar smoker, and want to look like a pipe smoker, go for it!! This is a tobacco that will not be in a rotation of mine at all. Five or six tins will be bought and left to age, perhaps a bowl once every 2 or 3 months; but, no more than that.

If this tobacco was aimed at cigar smokers that like mild dominican cigars - it's a hit ! Better than any crappy tinned cigar. However, I can't imagine a seasoned pipe smoker (whether he enjoys cigars or not) being impressed with this tobacco.

There's not enough to it to recommend. It's like a train that never gets to the station. I have tried this a number of times with the intention of finding out what I'm missing (and I often am happy that I bite my tongue-no pun intended and reserve judgement) but this is not an interesting tobacco IMO. It appears to be very mature wrapper leaf that doesn't have anything the complements it for depth. Of course my palate runs to stronger tobaccos so that's just my opinion.

Cheers, VC

This will be brief. I really like McC. blends, they are a mainstay for me. I first tried this and thought HMM, not bad. I guess it was the newness. Some will like this, but for me, keep cigar tobacco in a cigar and pipe tobacco in a pipe. To be fair, w/o the cigar leaf I think this would be a nice red VA blend. It seems familiar, I wonder.......