A couple of weeks ago, I received an invitation to attend a meeting of a cigar smoker’s club. An informal gathering that provides a setting for friends to share a good time while smoking fine cigars. Since I was in Santiago, I accepted immediately.
The concept was very simple: there was an assortment of cigars on the table and attendees were free to select the one(s) they wanted. Each person was then responsible for their own bar tab.
Last Dinner- January 2026
I had forgotten what it was like to be in Santiago during the summer (the Southern hemisphere has the opposite weather as the Northern one), so the heat motivated me to lean towards cold beer, something I repeated several times.
Good conversations always emerge when you are surrounded by friends. Even if you don’t know everyone around you, if all are passionate about cigars, it is as if we were all fans of the same football club and were at a sports bar watching our team play in a championship game!
The cigar assortment included some that I had previously smoked, from Fuller Cigar and also from Casa Magna, but there were new formats and I naturally went for those.
One of them was Atacama, from the Valles de Chile line, a cigar with a distinctive green band and with an excellent price/quality proposition. Its intensity was low-to-medium, but accompanied by a beer, it hardly came across as medium. In other words, the drink you pair the cigar with will invariably affect how you perceive the tobacco.
The composition of the cigar includes tobacco leaves from Ecuador and from the Dominican Republic, thus resulting in the low intensity. The format I selected was a Robusto (5 x 50), or about a 30-minute smoking session.
Cigar for Last Dinner- January 2026
More than finding the perfect beverage pairings for the cigars, the purpose of the gathering was for everyone to catch up. I took the opportunity to describe one of my recent pairings to one of the attendees.
This is what friendly reunions are for. Nowadays, most of us have children and finding the time to get together is complicated, so I took advantage of this opportunity and ended up smoking 3 cigars, while keeping myself properly hydrated!
It is essential to have opportunities like this one, for cigar afficionados such as us, even if they are not very frequent. I truly hope that you can make time to have one with your friends so that you too can have a great time, as I did in Santiago.
I wish everyone great success in 2026, may your dreams and goals become a reality. I hope that you remain healthy and that you always have a great bottle of rum nearby. May all negative thoughts and stresses dissipate with each puff from your cigars!
Warmest wishes to all!
Philip Ili Barake
#GRCigarPairing
