First, Happy New Year!

Like last year, the first week of the year will be kind of special. We’ve long held the belief that no cigar in anyone’s humidor should be sacred. They are made to be smoked after all. There’s no better time to smoke those special cigars than holidays. Like last year, we are digging deep and trying to review special cigars, special cigars for halfwheel.

In case you forgot/were unaware, last year during the first week of the year we reviewed a 2006 Cohiba Behike, an Oliva Serie V Culebra, a Montecristo Compay 95 Aniversario Salomones II, Ashton VSG Estate Reserve Corona Gorda, a Liga Privada No. 9 from the final test batch, an H. Upmann from the 1940s and a FFOX ForbiddenX Phantom Maduro. Crazy cigars.

To some extent last year drained us of the absurd and ridiculous, but we found some cool stuff to make the next week exciting and truly about the rarest and hardest-to-find, as opposed to simply prereleases and limited editions.

This means there will be no redux this week, there wasn’t one this past week because we were trying to wrap up the last of the 2012 reviews, which finished here.

Finally, we have decided to stop bolding reviews. Simply put, it got out of hand. There will still be some parts—bullet points and headers—bolded, but by-in-large the bolded text will be gone.

And in case you haven’t yet, don’t forget to register for our newest product, the halfwheel Newsletter.

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Charlie Minato

I am an editor and co-founder of halfwheel.com/Rueda Media, LLC. I previously co-founded and published TheCigarFeed, one of the two predecessors of halfwheel. I have written about the cigar industry for more than a decade, covering everything from product launches to regulation to M&A. In addition, I handle a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff here at halfwheel. I enjoy playing tennis, watching boxing, falling asleep to the Le Mans 24, wearing sweatshirts year-round and eating gyros. echte liebe.