This news comes from an article over at Cigar Aficionado

“Our goal is to bring the Dunhill brand to the forefront of consumers. It’s a prestige brand,” said Toraño president Charlie Toraño. “We will begin aggressively distributing the line in July.”

The deal is a first for Toraño, which up until now has only distributed its own brands. The cigarmaker has had a relationship with the Dunhill cigar for nearly seven years, first making the Dunhill signed range, then the reblended (and properly capitalized) Dunhill Signed Range.

This might be a good thing for the brand. I hope it means we will be seeing it in more places, and the price coming down. Though, this could be Toraño cashing in on the premium cigar market which has gained popularity.

I picked up a box of the new 601 brand “Box-Pressed Maduros” last week. For those who don’t already know, the 601 brand of cigars is a relatively new creation by EO Cigars/United Tobacco, having been introduced at the August 2006 RTDA conference. They are blended by José “Don Pepin” Garcia and manufactured at his new Nicaraguan Tabacalera Cubana factory.

The Box-Pressed Maduro is the third and newest product in the line, introduced in late March 2007. The MSRP on these are $9.15 each, but I have seen them selling for around $8.00 at cigar shops here in Dallas.
An interesting note about these cigars: this is reputed to be the very first box-pressed cigar made by Don Pepin, as well as being his first regular production maduro (not counting some special Tatuajes or cigars made during his stay at Tropical).

I am actually enjoying one right now. They have a typical bold Nicaraguan tobacco profile, but aren’t nearly as strong or as full bodied as the Tatuaje or Don Pepin brand cigars; in fact, they remind me more of a Padron — another fine Nicaraguan puro — than either of the two aforementioned brands. The cigar is very earthy, perhaps a bit mushroomy, with a floral sweetness to it, common of many maduro wrapped cigars. It’s a very pleasant cigar. On a scale of 1-to-5, I’d place it at a solid “4″.

601 Box-Pressed Maduro (box of 20):

Note the factory and date codes on the box; very Cuban-esque:

Also Cuban-esque is the use of a Schmale-brand latch on the SBN box:

Open box of cigars (Robusto size):

The 601 Box-Pressed Maduro cigar and band:

If you like Don Pepin’s other creations, or enjoy Nicaraguan maduro cigars in general, then I highly recommend picking some of these up. No, it’s not one of his “top shelf” cigars, but it’s a very solid performer that you’ll no doubt enjoy.

So my wife went to Las Vegas last week for a business conference, and being a cigar enthusiast, I naturally asked her if she’d be so kind as to swing by the Casa Fuente store at the Forum Shops of Caesars Palace to pick up one of their the exclusive Casa Fuente cigars. At $18 to $28 per stick, they’re not exactly cheap, but since the Casa Fuente store is the only place you can buy them, you get a certain collectibility with the purchase — and if there is any cigar brand with an inherent collectivity value, it’s Arturo Fuente.

As it turned out, my wife did better than just pick up a single stick; she purchased a 7-cigar sampler box containing one of each Casa Fuente vitola! The sampler box costs $150, a $13 savings on the price of buying the sticks individually, which would normally run $163.

Casa Fuente 7-cigar sampler box

Open box showing the enclosed Boveda Humidipak

Open box showing the cigars

All 7 vitolas (L-R): Double Corona, Churchill, Torpedo, Double Robusto, Belicos Finos, Corona Gorda, Robusto.

I’m certainly looking forward to smoking these cigars, as I am a fan of both the Opus X (on which the Casa Fuente filler is based) and Cameroon wrappers. I plan on letting them rest for a month in my humidor before burning one, but when I do, I will be sure to post a review here on the BOTL Cigar Blog.

In the meantime, I’m going to be extra-nice to my wife for making such a wonderful purchase!

I have generally been impressed with the La Gloria Cubana cigars. Both the ones rolled in Miami and the Dominican Republic cigars I have tried I enjoyed quite a bit (especially the ultra toothy Serie R.) According to Cigar Aficionado the owner Ernesto Perez-Carrillo is almost complete in creating a new line. The Miami factory, which used to produce part of the cigars along with the Dominican factory will become the place responsible for producing the new Miami line. We might have to get our hands on some of these once they are ready and give them a taste testing. Anyone with a Cigar Insider account want to tell us if we are missing any other details?

Sure, I live smack-dab in the middle of a city of 2.5 million people, but truth be told, I’m more redneck than metropolitan–or to use a more hip term, “metrosexual” (and note, the fact that I had to use quotes to fit that word into my conversation proves I’m not that hip). But even a redneck like myself will occasionally ask the question, “am I a pretentious cigar snob?”

You see, I’m sitting out on my back deck listening to the duck and geese squawking out by the creek, and I’m just about ready to light up the cigar in my hand: a well-aged Padron from 2003 that was gifted to me by fellow BOTL member jwintosh (I know that because I labeled the cigar with one of those little paper bands from Heartfelt Industries). Anyways, I just pulled the cigar out of an individual cigar-shaped plastic zip-lock bag — because as you know, Padron doesn’t cello-wrap their cigars, so I bagged it myself to protect the stick while it sat in my temperature and humidity controlled cigar humidor — and picked up one of my many cigar cutters, this time going for the Xikar cutter, which I slid out of its protective leather sheath.

SNIP!

Off comes the cap, clean and precise, exactly what you expect from a high-quality cutter. I give the cigar a pre-light draw to test the pull, and then reach down and grab my Xikar lighter, which I had just refilled minutes earlier with triple-refined lighter fuel. I toast the end and slowly light the cigar, savoring the initial burst of flavor. Then I set the cigar down in my One-Off Molino designer ashtray so I can check my email wirelessly on my Apple PowerBook.

And that’s when it hits me–this cigar is from 2003, which would have been right about the time I really seriously started smoking cigars. And you know what my first “real” cigar was? A Padron that was gifted to me by my buddy Justin. Difference was, when I smoked that first one, I bit the cap off with my teeth and lit it with a cheap disposable Bic lighter. And being a former cigarette smoker, I’m sure I inhaled some of it, too–and probably didn’t mind one bit. But thinking about the experience of smoking that first cigar compared to this one in my hand made me question, “I a pretentious cigar snob now?”

I’ve come to a conclusion:

No, I’m not a pretentious cigar snob; I’m just a well-accessorized redneck.

I just stumbled upon the Holy Smoke website and thought it was worth mentioning here for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

The site is run by Father H. Setter, a full blown priest from Kansas. For 10 years he has been holding cigar dinners with the proceeds going to different charities. Theres a list of some of them on the site, and according to the calendar he will be holding another in June.

In addition to his charity work the website also has useful links to cigar manufacturers, tips for people new to cigars, cigar friendly establishments, and even an area with the father’s merchandise.

Ask any serious cigar smoker who’s smoked cigarettes before, they’ll all tell you the same thing: cigars and cigarettes are two radically different products. Yes, they’re both made from the leaves of a tobacco plant, and yes both are consumed by burning, but beyond that, there’s terribly little in common with the two.

I smoked cigarettes for 15 years, in college and all throughout my twenties. I finally quit when I was 33, and it was truly the most difficult thing I’d ever done. The combination of mental and physical addiction was nearly impossible to overcome. I mean, I really didn’t even enjoy smoking–cigarettes themselves aren’t particularly pleasant. They’re rather tasteless and bland, are chocked-full of harmful chemicals, and in today’s world you’re practically ostracized by society if you smoke.

Smoking premium handmade cigars, on the other hand, is an entirely different experience–far more akin to drinking a glass of fine wine than sucking down a dry-cured, machine-made, chemical-filled, paper-wrapped, homogenized-tobacco cigarette. Unfortunately, most people today don’t understand the difference between the two. We’re all indoctrinated to the fact that smoking cigarettes is an unhealthy, cancer causing, addictive habit. Ask a non-smoker what they think of cigarettes and they’ll answer, “Yuk.” Ask them about cigars and they’ll most likely provide the same answer because they can’t appreciate the difference.

But cigar smokers understand.

First and foremost, premium handmade cigars are constructed of pure, unprocessed natural tobacco leaves. No chemical additives, no homogenized chopped-and-mixed tobacco, no paper, no chemically processed cellulose filer.

But even beyond the physical makeup, the big difference in cigars versus cigarettes is consumption. For the most part, cigar smokers don’t inhale the smoke, and typically cigars are consumed at a fraction of the rate of cigarettes. A typical cigarette smoker will suck down 20 or more per day, but a typical cigar smoker smokes only a few sticks per week. Granted, there’s a lot more tobacco in a single cigar than in a whole stack of cigarettes, but there’s no added chemicals and (again, for the most part) cigars aren’t inhaled into the lungs. Because of that, cigar smokers are subject to significantly fewer harmful toxins than cigarette smokers.

But even more important than any of that is the cigar smoking experience itself. Unlike a cigarette, smoking a cigar isn’t about the delivery of nicotine–just like drinking a fine wine isn’t about the consumption of alcohol. Smoking a cigar is about the symphony of flavors, the admiration of the fine construction, the appreciation of the aroma, the use of the accessories, the hobby of collecting, and possibly most important of all, the camaraderie of enjoying one with a group of fellow cigar smokers.

It is a sort of brotherhood.

And we are Brothers of the Leaf.

As I sit here on my back deck smoking a cigar, quietly contemplating why I smoke cigars, how radically different they are from cigarettes, and how best to translate that into written word for this, my first blog post, I’m struck by how absurdly long the name is of this particular cigar I’m smoking: Cuesta-Rey Centenario Pyramid No. 9 Stanford’s Cameroon Reserve. That’s 56 characters–not including spaces–just to name the cigar!

It reminded me of a story about a college girlfriend. She and I had only recently begun dating, and I mentioned that I needed to stop at a convenience store to buy some cigarettes. She casually asked if I could pick her up a pack of her brand as well. Naturally I said, “sure, whatca want?” thinking it was a great opportunity to do something nice for her–I mean hey, good deeds and favors are always a great way to start a relationship, especially when you’re trying to get in their pants.

Unfortunately, she proceeded to rattle off the longest cigarette brand name I’d ever heard. “Uh, what was that again?”, I aksed, as my heart sank into my stomach, knowing how difficult it would be to remember such a complex name (and cripes, buying a girl the wrong brand of smokes surely would ruin my chances of separating her from her pants). She repeated it again–slowly this time, as if I were mentally challenged–and made me repeat it back a few times to make sure I’d properly memorized it.

Somehow, I managed to stumble in to the Gas-n-Sip and correctly repeat the insanely long brand name to the clerk, who promptly handed them to me and accepted payment. Proudly, I strutted back out to the car and handed her the pack of smokes, smiling ear to ear because I knew I’d gotten it correct: Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Light Menthol 100’s. That’s 41 characters–not including spaces–and I’d nailed it perfectly.

She smiled and said, “thanks…but where are your cigarettes?”

Crap! In my desperation to properly remember her brand, I’d completely forgotten to buy what I’d gone in for in the first place. Thankfully, she didn’t hold that against me; apparently, stupidity can sometimes be cute.

An AP news item on Forbes mentions that the harvest of Cuba’s cigar tobacco fell 12 percent compared to last year because of heavy rains.

They also reported hiring 11,700 workers for the next harvest. Have the resulting cigars suffered? Perhaps next years batch will be even better with more tobacco to choose from.

You can check out over at the Toraño site their new Noventa (spanish for ninety) limited edition cigar.

The Noventa is a celebration of the Toraño family’s 90-year tradition as tobacco growers and producers of some of the finest hand-rolled cigars in the world. It is a blend made from the best 5 year old Nicaraguan tobacco, hand selected by the Toraño family from their farms in Nicaragua. The Cigars are aged in reserve until they reach their peak, resulting in elegant, rich yet smooth, perfectly balanced flavor in a medium bodied strength.

Wrapper: Habano Nicaragua

Binder: Habano Nicaragua
Filler: Pueblo Nuevo, Esteli, Jalapa and Condega (Nicaraguan Regions)

Sizes:
La Esperanza 6 x 52

Latin 6 x 54
Santiago 5 x 50

Looks like a nice nicaraguan puro. No word yet on when it will be released.

Via Luxist