It would be excellent if you could share some pictures during that time. I'm curious to see how it progresses.
I would not water a cirio like a Plumeria or Pachypodium or Adenium. Maybe if you've got warm, dry conditions you would need to water more often. But no more often than your run of the mill succulent.
I also have an ocotillo seedling (F. splendens) and that one I water twice as often, actually. It is always in leaf and maybe a quarter the time in growth.
But the cirio is on my regular watering plan, which works for most succulents. My goal is for the soil to go dry each time.
Whether a cirio drops all its leaves in summer or not is really not informative about anything. You can call that dormancy but some dormant cirios don't drop all their leaves. I think the stem is photosynthetic (fresh stem certainly is) so there is never a total shutdown. Here in our mild climate.
I've had it go both ways (leafy or not at the end of summer) and the outcome in late fall was just the same when the plant woke up. The signs of active growth (short red branches with the spine leaves, the green area at the top of the stem) are much more meaningful, in terms of its growth state. Plants in the ground behave sort of differently, to be sure, and are much more forgiving overall. But the container cirios are more in active growth or not, rather than in leaf or not. That's the way I look at the situation anyway. To the extent it changes my behavior at all.
Mother nature shows up with winter storms to take care of business.
