Casa Carrillo Pledge Sojourn

By the time Ernesto Perez-Carrillo introduced Pledge in 2020, he had spent nearly fifty years in the cigar industry, building a career that began in Miami and eventually led him to establish his own factory in Santiago, Dominican Republic. Pledge was the third release in his Perez-Carrillo Series, following La Historia in 2014 and Encore in 2018. Both predecessors had received extraordinary recognition from Cigar Aficionado, with La Historia finishing second in 2014 and Encore earning the magazine's top honor in 2018. Perez-Carrillo felt considerable pressure to complete the series with something worthy of the first two. He spent more than six months experimenting with different blends before settling on a tobacco he had first encountered nearly forty years earlier. 

The defining ingredient was a Connecticut-grown, Cuban-seed Habano wrapper, a relatively uncommon tobacco that Perez-Carrillo had begun working with in Miami during the early 1980s. Unlike the pale Connecticut Shade wrappers familiar to many smokers, this leaf is dark, robust, and considerably more assertive. He paired it with an Ecuadorian binder and Nicaraguan fillers, creating what would become one of the fullest expressions in his portfolio. Even the name was chosen unusually. At the 2019 Big Smoke in Las Vegas, attendees voted among three possibilities, ultimately selecting Pledge, a reference to Perez-Carrillo's promise to continue working with distinctive tobaccos and developing new blends. Released in September 2020, the Pledge Prequel received 98 points and was named Cigar Aficionado's No. 1 Cigar of 2020, the highest score awarded to a year-end winner up to that point. It was a remarkable conclusion to a series that had produced two first-place finishes and one second-place finish in just seven years.