 
Around the Cigar World:A to Z
By Mark Bernardo
What a difference
10 years makes. Even the most savvy of cigar enthusiasts had a fairly narrow worldview about their hobby when this magazine debuted in late 1995: in short, great cigars came from Cuba, some decent cigars were made in a few tropical nations, and cheap cigars were made by machines here in the U.S.A. As we've all gotten more and more educated, and the skill of cigar making and tobacco growing has taken root in places far afield of the embargoed island, we've discovered the map of the cigar world is a bit more far-reaching than many of us thought - and getting larger all the time. Herewith, an alphabetical state-of-the-cigar world report that demonstrates that cigars have become truly a worldwide phenomenon.
It is for its darker, sun-grown wrapper that many cigar enthusiasts revere Ecuador, however - such as the leaf that wraps the popular Ashton Virgin Sun-Grown line and the rare, reddish-tinged variety on the Punch Rare Corojo.
Ecuador has made some noise in the cigar-producing department recently as well. Puros de Armando Ramos is a company based in Guayaquill that has demanded attention with their full-bodied Magus line of cigars, made from all-Ecuadorian "swamp" tobacco.
The ascension of Fidel Castro to power in the late 1950s led to the nationalization of Cuba's cigar businesses, and the subsequent exodus of many of its greatest cigar makers who took their expertise, and in some cases, their famous brands, with them. The past decade has seen many of Cuba's cigar brands (some of which are still made there despite the objections of their originators) emerging in new incarnations for the U.S. market, made in factories in Honduras or the Dominican Republic.
SMOKE - Winter, 2005/2006   |
The so-called "Dark Continent" produces some of the world's finest cigar wrapper leaf in the tiny nation of Cameroon. Grown in a foggy, humid climate, Cameroon wrapper is renowned for its reddish-brown color, its pleasant spiciness, and - due to the difficulties in growing it and the expense of importing it - its relative rarity. Cigars noteworthy for their Cameroon wrappers include the Dominican Partagas and Cohiba; H. Upmann Vintage Cameroon and Anniversary Series; Arturo Fuente Don Carlos; La Aurora; C.A.O. L'Anniversaire Cameroon Collection; and more recently, Montecristo Afrique, Cusano Killer Cameroon, and Cuban Crafters Cameroon. Cameroon leaf also spices up the filler of the Don Lino Africa, introduced in 2003.
The largest nation in South America is renowned for its wondrous beaches and a steady supply of shapely supermodels, but it has also become known as a source of excellent cigar tobacco. Two types have gained a following among cigar makers and consumers: Mata Fina, regarded as Brazil's finest, grown in the fertile Bahia region; and the ink-dark, bold-yet-sweet Ariparaca, used as maduro wrapper in such cigars as the C.A.O. Brazilia, Carlos Tora-o Signature Collection, Victor Sinclair Bohemian, and Garo Maduro. Brazilian cigarmakers are slowly breaking into the U.S. market with puros like Dona Flor, Caravelas, and Aquarius.
One of Central America's most popular eco-tourism spots is forging a reputation as a grower of excellent cigar tobacco. As a producer, Costa Rica became a cigar boom-era hotspot thanks to the success of the Bahia brand, which has since moved production to neighboring Nicaragua. Because of Costa Rica's comparatively healthy economy and high standard of living, cigar businesses, which must employ scores of native workers to hand-roll their products, have been largely priced out of Costa Rica, with a few notable exceptions. Bucanero Cigars has released Treasure, a cigar made with all Costa Rican tobacco. Bahamas-based Graycliff Cigar Company uses Costa Rican tobacco as wrapper, binder, and part of the filler blend of its acclaimed Espresso line. Rich, oily Costa Rican maduro wrappers are becoming increasingly popular alternatives to broadleaf and dark leaves from Brazil, Mexico, and Ecuador.
The 1990s Cigar Boom probably did more for this Caribbean nation - which shares an island with Haiti - than any other. Expatriate Cuban cigarmakers brought seeds here that yielded exceptional cigar tobacco in the Cibao and Real valleys, and by the early 1990s cigar factories sprung up all over the D.R., making it the biggest cigar exporter to the United States. The release of the Fuente Fuente Opus X in 1995 (made from a crop planted in 1992-93) even put the lie to the notion that it was impossible to grow good wrapper there - though Fuente's success in that area has yet to be duplicated on a similar scale. Though the post-boom shakeout reduced the number of factories there, the D.R. retains the largest share of the U.S. market. Brands like Fuente, Ashton, La Flor Dominicana, Macanudo, Partagas, Montecristo, La Gloria Cubana, Diamond Crown, Davidoff, and La Aurora leading the way for an ever-growing field
of newcomers.
This string of islands off the tip of Florida were a favorite fishing haunt of Ernest Hemingway, and a destination for many Spaniards and Cubans who brought the cigar making trade with them. Key West in particular, due to perfectly humid climate and proximity to Cuba, became an important link in the chain between the Cuban cigar industry and its growing market in the U.S. in the 19th century. Companies in Havana opened branch factories or moved operations entirely to this new cigar making hub, making Key West, after the Civil War, the fastest-growing city. A series of hurricanes in the early 1900s followed by the Great Depression took their toll on the Keys' cigar industry. Today, with their many open-air bars and restaurants, the Keys have become a Mecca for cigar smokers - despite the state's indoor smoking bans. Small local factories such as the Island Smoke Shop in Key Largo still produce some of the best cigars made anywhere.
Switzerland's most cosmopolitan city - the European headquarters of the United Nations - is also home base to one of the world's most well-known and well-respected cigar companies, Davidoff of Geneva. It all started when the father of young Zino Davidoff fled Russia with his family and opened Geneva's first tobacco shop in 1911. Zino traveled extensively in his youth to learn all there was to know about cigar making, and in 1929 returned to the family business, creating a section devoted solely to cigars that included (some say) the first cellar-style humidor that kept cigars in perfect condition. The original Davidoff cigars were among Cuba's finest, and the ones made now in the Dominican Republic have also found a large, devoted following. One of the 20th century's most beloved and iconic spokesmen for the pleasures of cigar smoking, Zino Davidoff passed on in 1994.
An increasingly important cigar producing nation, and one of the post-Embargo "big three," along with the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, Honduras produces cigars in factories located in three major cigar-producing areas: Danl', Cofradia, and Santa Rosa de Copan. In recent years, the country has also become known as a source of prime wrapper, with the Jamastran, Talanga, and San Agustin Valleys all yielding fine leaf. Villazon and Co., now part of General Cigar, produces many of the more well-known brands from Honduras - Punch, Hoyo de Monterrey, Sancho Panza, and Don Tomas - and the massive Altadis facility produces many of the company's popular launches of recent years, like Maria Guerrero, Saint Luis Rey, and Gispert. The full-bodied Camacho (a Honduran puro) and Puros Indios have also helped put the country on the cigar connoisseur's map.
Horse racing, bourbon, and the Colonel's fried chicken spring to mind at the mention of the Bluegrass State. But Kentucky has also traditionally been one of the U.S.'s leading tobacco producers; a century ago, more than 20 domestic cigar companies called it home. While cigar manufacturing no longer takes place there, and most of the tobacco crop is burley for cigarettes, a region known as the "Black Patch" still grows a strain of broadleaf tobacco used as wrapper by a few Kentucky-based cigar companies who produce limited amounts of handmade cigars with Caribbean filler.
What can be said about a place in the U.S. that claims to be home to more Cubans than Havana? Thrust into the national spotlight by the Elian Gonzalez incident in 2000, the Little Havana section of Miami - populated largely with Cuban immigrants and refugees fleeing Castro's government - still retains all the flavor of the island, including a number of old-fashioned cigar shops and Cuban restaurants.
When Cuban cigars became verboten in the States in the 1960s, Mexico leapt in to fill the breach for cigar smokers accustomed to full-bodied smokes. The nation's leading brand, Te-Amo, became a hit, and its famous bullfighter logo a familiar sight at tobacco shops, drugstores, and newsstands across the country. The shakeout of the cigar boom was not kind to Mexico, as consumers have flocked to the products from Central America and the Caribbean to the detriment of the reliable Mexican brand. However, premium cigars such as the Te-Amo Anniversario, Te-Amo Cabinet Series, and most recently A. Turrent (all of which blend the best Mexican leaf with leaf from other countries) have gone a long way to put the nation back in the spotlight.
Political strife and bloody warfare between the Communist-backed Sandinista regime and U.S.-backed Contra rebels put this Central American country on the 6 o'clock news throughout the 1980s. By the late 1990s, we all were noticing Nicaragua for a different reason: it was putting out some of the finest full-bodied cigars available in the U.S. Recognizing soil and climate comparable to Cuba's, Cuban-heritage cigar makers like Jorge Padron, Nestor Plasencia, and Nick Perdomo set up shop in the tobacco hub of Esteli to produce mostly rich, spicy, full-bodied cigars that rocketed to the must-buy lists of U.S. smokers in the late 1990s. Some of the cigars that have become household names include Padr-n, Perdomo, Joya de Nicaragua, C.A.O. Gold and L'Anniversaire, Bahia (originally made in Costa Rica), and Drew Estate.
A nation with minimal tobacco tradition, but ideal growing conditions, Peru has begun to dabble in making cigars (like the San Martin Peruvian puros recently introduced in the U.S.). Among savvy cigar lovers, however, it has become the land of the Secret Ingredient - that smattering in the filler that adds a special "oomph" to some of their favorite premium brands. Peruvian filler has enhanced brands like the El Original, Fonseca Sun-Grown Cedar, Altadis's Saint Luis Rey, Zino Platinum Crown Series, and recently, La Aurora 1495.
The European country most essential to tobacco history traces its influence back to Christopher Columbus's landmark voyage to America in 1492. Cuba, a landing site of his sojourn, became a colony of the Spanish Crown until winning its independence in 1898 in the Spanish-American War. The cigar trade of its former colony migrated to the Canary Islands, where tobacco products have been made since as early as 1723. Today, the handful of factories that remain in the Canaries produce mostly mild-to-medium-bodied cigars such as Pe-amil Oro, Condal, Victoria, and Coronas Reserva.
Oddly, while cigar smoking has seen rising popularity throughout Europe and Asia in the last decade, it is still not very prevalent among the Turkish people. However, this mountainous Muslim nation is renowned for the unique aromatic tobaccos grown there, and recently, for exporting one of their unique smoking customs to the New World: the nargile, or "hookah" pipe. Turkish tobacco is usually blended with fuller-bodied Virginia and Burley tobaccos to blend into cigarettes, and the stronger tumbak strain is used in nargile pipes, which have gained a devoted cult following in the U.S. The city of Ekeshir in central Turkey is the world's source of meerschaum, the rare mineral used to make ornate pipes prized by collectors. One premium cigar is known to use Turkish leaf: the uniquely flavored Natural by Drew Estates.
The world's largest premium cigar market has not been a major cigar producer since the pre-Embargo heyday of Tampa, and has never been known to grow great cigar leaf, with one notable exception. The Connecticut River Valley in New England possesses a unique microclimate that is ideal for growing the most difficult tobacco of all: shade-grown wrapper leaf. Connecticut shade wrappers - at their best golden-brown, oily-smooth, and tinged with a hint of sweetness - adorn many of the cigar world's most sought-after brands, including Montecristo, Macanudo, Savinelli ELR, Dunhill, Diamond Crown, and Don Diego. The region's other signature variety, Connecticut broadleaf, makes a heavy, gritty, cocoa-brown maduro wrapper for cigars like Avo Maduro, Topper Cosmo, La Perla Habana Black Pearl, and Bahia Gold Maduro, among others. Connecticut Valley Tobacconist, a company based in the heart of the state's tobacco country, makes Battleground, a brand that uses U.S. history as inspiration for its Civil War-themed cigars.
The "Nail City," a blue-collar industrial town in the West Virginia panhandle between Ohio and Pennsylvania, was the home of the oldest cigar manufacturer in the U.S. operating under its original name in the same city - M. Marsh and Son. The manufacturer of Marsh Wheeling Stogies - founded in 1840 by Miflin M. Marsh - had all its brands acquired in 2001 by National Cigar Corporation, who closed the venerable Wheeling plant and moved operations to Frankfort, Indiana. Marsh Wheeling cigars were one of the first and most famous to use the term "stogies" in their packaging - the term having arisen from the Conestoga wagons whose drivers customarily smoked the long, thin, rustic-style cigar in their travels along the National Road.
and to cigar lovers, that can only mean Cuba, the cradle of premium cigars. A land of myth and mystery, whose fabled puros are often frustratingly out of reach, many of the world's most recognizable brands originated here - Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta, H. Upmann, Punch, Partagas, and Cohiba. The cigar factories of Havana are legendary, and the fertile fields of the Vuelta Abajo in the Pinar del Rio province on the western end of the island, are recognized by connoisseurs worldwide as the world's finest provider of filler, binder, and wrapper tobacco. Alas, thanks to the U.S. embargo placed on Cuba in 1962, Americans can only appreciate these qualities when traveling internationally or by skirting the law.
Named for its founder, Cuban cigar manufacturer Don Vicente Ybor, this historic district of Tampa, Florida was once the capital of cigar making in the U.S. In its turn-of-the-century heyday, over 300 cigar factories, staffed by an assortment of Cuban, Spanish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, operated here, cranking out hundreds of millions of cigars a year for customers all over the world. Over the course of the 20th Century, economic and cultural changes in the U.S. took their toll on the domestic cigar industry, and except for a brief revival during the cigar boom, Ybor City no longer produces cigars on a large scale. However, with large pieces of its past either still standing or rebuilt, Ybor is a must-see for travelers interested in the history of cigars.