Davidoff Limited Edition 2024 Year of the Dragon

Each time I think about Davidoff’s Zodiac Series, I come back to one thing: so many other companies have knocked this off.

As evidenced by how Davidoff’s competitors have copied it, the Zodiac Series has been one of the most successful concepts introduced in the modern cigar market. This year, we have seen Year of the Dragon-themed cigars from Davidoff, General Cigar Co., Gurkha, Habanos S.A., Oliva, La Galera, Maya Selva, Plasencia, Rocky Patel and Vega Fina, not to mention the various accessory companies that have launched Dragon-themed items of their own.

It is impossible for me to believe that anyone could have seen this coming, especially not Davidoff itself. The series started in more or less secrecy, with the first release believed to have gone on sale in 2011, with a 6 x 52 torpedo that was sold at the very least in Japan but perhaps elsewhere in Asia. Even Davidoff’s U.S. employees weren’t quite sure of that first release; I remember being with some of them a few years later at the Davidoff factory in the Dominican Republic when we spotted a crate labeled Dragon in the aging room, seemingly confirming that there was a Year of the Dragon release.

I, like most of the world, got my first introduction to this concept in 2012, when Davidoff announced the Year of the Snake as a global release. Since then, Davidoff has released a new Zodiac Series cigar each and every year, with the new cigars arriving in November ahead of the upcoming Chinese New Year.

Chinese New Year 2024 begins today, Feb. 10, and this year’s symbol is the dragon.

Like the past few years, there are two different Davidoff Year of the Dragon cigars:

• Davidoff Limited Edition 2024 Year of the Dragon (7 1/2 x 50) — $59 (Box of 10, $590)
• Davidoff Limited Edition 2024 Year of the Dragon Gran Toro (6 x 56) — $89 (Box of 24, $2,136)

First, there’s the standard Year of the Dragon double corona, pictured above, which is limited to 19,500 boxes of 10 cigars.

Then, there’s the Year of the Dragon Gran Toro, a 6 x 56 cigar offered either in 24-count boxes sold or in a Dragon Masterpiece Humidor ($49,000) that contains 88 cigars. The Gran Toro is sold only at the Davidoff of Geneva — since 1911 flagship stores worldwide.

Both cigars use the same blend: an Ecuadorian wrapper over a Dominican binder and fillers from the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Nicaragua. Davidoff says that the tobacco in each cigar has been aged for a combined 60 years.

As it has done in the past, Davidoff has also produced a special version of its Double Blade Cutter ($530), ashtray ($490) and pipe tobacco. You can read more about the other items here.

• Cigar Reviewed: Davidoff Limited Edition 2024 Year of the Dragon
• Country of Origin: Dominican Republic
• Factory: Cigars Davidoff
• Wrapper: Ecuador
• Binder: Dominican Republic
• Filler: Dominican Republic, Mexico & Nicaragua
• Length: 7 1/2 Inches
• Ring Gauge: 50
• Vitola: Double Corona
• MSRP: $59 (Box of 10, $590)
• Release Date: Nov. 16, 2023
• Number of Cigars Released: 19,500 Boxes of 10 Cigars (195,000 Total Cigars)
• Number of Cigars Smoked For Review: 3

After a couple of years of less imposing Zodiac Series cigars, the Year of the Dragon stands out as a very large cigar. I’m torn about whether the foot band’s covering of the brushed foot is a good thing or bad thing. On one hand, it adds a surprise element and makes the cigar look more like a Davidoff. On the other hand, it covers up the most unique feature of the cigar’s appearance. As for the wrapper, it’s a dark brown color with lots of veins and great red colors. One cigar in particular has very thick veins that I can feel with my hands, though they are on the backside of the cigar, something done intentionally to preserve the appearance. The aroma from the wrapper is medium-full with ammonia—on one cigar more of a vinegar smell—along with barnyard and earthiness. It’s not my favorite smell. The foot is also medium-full with milk chocolate, leading to differing secondary notes depending on the cigar: popcorn, generic earthiness, leather and vinegar. Fortunately, none of that ammonia or acidity makes its way to the cold draws, which are generally medium-full. Flavors differ between the cigars, but the leading notes are cereal grain, milk chocolate, or barnyard, with secondary notes including those three flavors as well as brown sugar, berry sweetness, leather, and red apple.

While I don’t subscribe to the theory that the wrapper provides 90 percent of a cigar’s flavor or even most of a cigar’s flavor, many cigars with brushed feet don’t start out with the most nuanced profiles. Fortunately, that’s not the case with the Davidoff Limited Edition 2024 Year of the Dragon, especially the first cigar I smoke. It’s slightly tarter with lots of earthiness over some grains and semisweet berries. The flavor builds with earthiness and woodiness getting stronger until creaminess and saltiness come in. I find the subsequent cigars to be similar, albeit with a syrupy-like thickness and a bit more sweetness and nuttiness. Early on, it’s pretty apparent to me that this is going to be a darker Davidoff profile than, say, Davidoff Classic or even Aniversario. There’s a thick, earthy profile with accents of roasted flavors, hard pretzel, pistachios, and creaminess. White pepper, acidity and saltiness accent the core flavors and create more depth. It tends to get a tad bit bitter during the finish. Ritz crackers and creaminess provide a natural transition before some bitter starchy flavors and pepper emerge, though they are both muted. At times, the finish is spicier with black pepper leading mild amounts of toastiness and honey. Retrohales have a generic nutty mixture with butter and burnt creaminess, almost like a roux gone wrong. There’s sharpness at the end, but like the finish, it doesn’t fully develop. Unfortunately, the retrohale’s finish is oftentimes a dud: there’s flavor, there’s flavor and then it suddenly disappears without any sort of noticeable transition. Flavor is full, body is close to full and strength is medium. All three cigars have combustion problems: the first cigar I smoke has some minor tunneling issues and the third cigar just goes out right around the transition from the brushed foot.

All three cigars get a darker profile thanks to sharper and bolder flavors. While this change is most noticeable after the midway point, even the earlier parts of the second third show a drier profile with woodiness and a generic nuttiness leading. Secondary flavors include toastiness, leather, saltiness, terroir, generic potato starchiness and meatiness. Barnyard and toastiness pick up at the midway point, further accentuating that dark profile. The earthiness and roasted flavors increase in intensity during the finish, though the profile is a bit underwhelming compared to the first third. At times, a semisweet and muted apple cider flavor enters the fray, oftentimes joined by an increased amount of black pepper. While I can’t taste many of the delicate elements in my mouth, retrohaling delivers a much brighter profile with bread and other flavors over some saltines, rich nuttiness and chicken stock. During the finish, these flavors get much more acidic and sharper before toastiness, terroir, and pepper take over. Flavor is full, body is full, and strength is medium-plus. As in the first third, all three cigars need at least one touch-up to help with combustion issues.

It’s very difficult for me to tell if the flavors of the Davidoff Limited Edition 2024 Year of the Dragon have changed much. Certainly, the list of flavors I’m tasting—woodiness, nuttiness, terroir, toastiness, black pepper—is more or less the same. I find the toastiness and nuttiness to increase in intensity compared to the others, but the final third of the Davidoff Limited Edition 2024 Year of the Dragon is quite similar to the second third. While there’s less bitterness and more crispness, I find the profile to be darker. Perhaps that’s my mind playing tricks on me and confusing the profile’s linear uptick in intensity to correspond with this darkness, but it seems like it continues to drift further away from being bright and sweet. Retrohales remain an outlier as they deliver a milky creaminess that sits atop nuttiness and earthiness. While the floral and acidic flavors aren’t present, retrohales avoid any of the toastiness, which inherently makes them seem less dark than the mouth flavors. The finish gets sharper but without the acidity. There’s lots of toastiness and terroir over black pepper. Flavor is full, body is medium-full, and strength is medium-full or full. As before, I continue to struggle with combustion on all three cigars. By this point, it feels like the draw has also gotten a bit looser on one cigar.

Final Notes

• In December, Gurkha Cigar Group, Inc.—which uses a dragon trademark under license from K. Hansotia & Co., Inc.—sued Davidoff over the name of this cigar.
• I am not an attorney, so take the next handful of bullet points with major grains of salt.
• I would be fascinated if this went to trial and we were able to learn about all the various licensing agreements that Gurkha has signed with the other companies that have created Year of the Dragon cigars. I suspect that it will never get there. I think the only question is whether Davidoff will pay a small fee to Gurkha to just wrap this up quickly or if both companies will spend far more money dragging this out.

• What little I know about trademark law suggests to me that this is not a clear-cut win for Gurkha. First, I think Davidoff could argue that it’s already sold a Year of the Dragon cigar in the U.S. In December 2018, Davidoff sold a small number of cigars that were marketed as the Davidoff Cuvée Selection 2012 Year of the Dragon. While neither the bands nor bundles said “dragon” on them, as evidenced by the above image sent by Davidoff via email in December 2018, Davidoff marketed it using the word “dragon.”
• Second, given how many other companies are selling Year of the Dragon cigars, I’m not sure how Gurkha is going to determine the potential damages that are directly caused by Davidoff. Again, I’m not an attorney, but it’s very difficult for me to understand how much was, potentially, done by Davidoff versus Plasencia’s or Rocky Patel’s releases.
• Unless Gurkha has filed subsequent lawsuits in different courts, as of Feb. 8, 2024, it appears it has only filed a lawsuit against Davidoff. It’s entirely possible that Gurkha has sent legal letters to other companies and hasn’t gotten to a point of filing lawsuits against those entities.
• As of Feb. 8, 2024, there have been no updates since Dec. 20 in this case.
• For those bemoaning Gurkha for doing this, my understanding is that if you have a trademark, you have two options. You can choose not to defend your trademark or you choose to defend it every time. The latter is expensive, time-consuming, and oftentimes not a PR win, but if you want the mark to mean something, you have to defend it in each and every instance.

• This isn’t the first time I’ve smoked a Davidoff white label cigar with a brushed foot. While the brand is not known for selling cigars with a brushed foot, it uses cigars with brushed feet for events and factory tours.
• If all of these boxes sold at their $590 MSRP, it would amount to more than $11.5 million in retail sales, more than many cigar companies generate in a single year. There’s another $1.28 million in Flagship Edition sales, $1.23 million in humidors, $600,000 in ashtrays and cutters. All told, it’s more than $14.5 million in retail sales, a staggering amount of money for a limited edition(s) that will be more or less sold out before the next Zodiac Series cigar is released.
• This cigar finished #7 on halfwheel’s Packaging Top 10 of 2023.

• Yesterday, Davidoff announced a 96-cigar sampler containing each of the 12 main Zodiac Series cigars. The Davidoff The Year of Collector’s Edition is limited to just 100 units.
• I have seen one non-Davidoff flagship store advertise a full box of the Year of the Dragon Flagship Edition for sale. I’m not sure if that was done through official channels, though the box is listed at MSRP.
• I found this profile to deliver a noticeable amount of mouth salivation.
• The combustion issues are a huge annoyance for this cigar because the flavor profile is one that really shines when the cigar is smoked slowly. Increasing the puff rate slightly has a more than slight impact on the profile, leading to more toastiness and bitterness.
• I was feeling the nicotine on the second cigar I smoked, easily one of the strongest Davidoffs I’ve ever smoked in my life. I cannot say that about the other two cigars.
• I found the ash to be flaky. The third cigar I smoked had extremely flaky ash, something I do not associate with Davidoffs. That cigar was the one that had the most combustion issues, starting with the cigar completely going out right around the end of the brushed foot.
• Davidoff advertises on halfwheel.
• Cigars for this review were purchased by halfwheel.
• Final smoking time was nearly three and a half hours. The first third seemed to go much slower than the other parts. Interestingly, it wasn’t the brushed foot. That burned at a decent pace, but once the wrapper started, the cigar was moving at an epically slow pace.