You've mastered the origin of every cigar in your humidor. But do you really understand all the differences among the vintage labels? What do they really mean?

Vintage. For wine makers, the definition of the word is clearly stated in Webster's New World Dictionary: "The crop yield of a particular vineyard or grape-growing region in a single season." However, it is Webster's less precise secondary definition — "representative of or dating from a period long past" — that applies to cigars that carry the word 'vintage' in their name.

As cigar manufacturers have become more eager to differentiate their best cigars from their regular lines and to offer something that no other manufacturer can, the word vintage is being used more often. But explaining to a customer what "vintage" means can be a dicey proposition for a smoke shop owner trying to justify the upwards of $20 that some vintage cigars command.

"It mostly is just a marketing term," said Arthur Zaretsky, owner of New York-based Famous Cigars, which distributes Olor Vintage cigars. "There should be a standard definition, but I don't know that there could be. And even if there could be, who would regulate it? If someone wanted to put a year on a cigar, who's going to know for sure what it means, except for the company?" Knowledgeable retailers must look beyond the label to learn the truth in each and every instance.

"The term vintage is misused, misconceived, and misunderstood in the cigar business," said Peter Strauss, executive vice president of Tabacalera Cigars International (USA) Inc., Tampa, Fla., a subsidiary of Madrid-based Tabacalera S.A.

The difficulty in understanding the cigar industry's use of the word vintage is compounded by nearly every manufacturer because each makes vintage cigars under the terms of their own definition.

General Cigar Corp., of Bloomfield, Conn., for instance, expresses a vintage year for its Macanudo brand based on when the wrapper was grown. So does U.S. Cigar Sales, Inc., of Seattle, Wash., for its Astral Vintage line. But Tony Borhani Cigars Inc., of San Diego, Calif., dates its Bahia Vintage cigars based on the year the filler and binder were grown, except for its vintage maduro line, which is dated according to the year the wrapper was harvested.

Don't assume the size of the company or the familiarity of a particular brand can lend any clue. Tabacalera Cigars International (USA) Inc. doesn't date its Romeo y Julieta Vintage cigars at all. Nor does Houston-based Butera International Cigar Corp. for its Royal Butera Vintage line, or House of Oxford Distributors Inc., New York, N.Y., which markets the Dominican-made Nestor 747 Vintage. The cigar-making Fuente family adds the word vintage to its regular lines of cigars that are sold in duty-free shops around the world, strictly for record-keeping purposes.

Cerdans manufactured in 1982 were abandoned by their owner in a bonded warehouse in Switzerland and sold last year at auction to recover the storage costs, according to the distributor, L.J. Fine Cigars.

What they are…
What they aren't
Some vintage cigars live up to the most ethereal mystique implied by the term, a combination of rarity and age that limits a cigar's ability to ever be duplicated. L.J. Fine Cigars, a smoke shop in North Palm Beach, Fla., offers in national magazine ads four sizes of a 1982 Cerdan Vintage cigar that wasn't meant to be a vintage cigar at all. L.J. owner Arthur Balik says a batch of Cerdans manufactured in 1982 were abandoned by their owner in a bonded warehouse in Switzerland and sold last year at auction to recover the storage costs.

"Cigars, like wine — if treated right — get better and better," Balik said. "These were kept under perfect conditions. They were in a bonded warehouse for 16 years. They are packed in their original boxes and the boxes were packed in cartons. When they were opened, the cartons were stuffed with newspapers, all dating from 1982. That's how we know for certain that these were made in 1982.

"We have a fair amount of them. From the perspective of the entire U.S. market for cigars, it is not a lot," said Balik. With so many definitions of vintage floating around the cigar industry, it's not surprising that customers are confused about what is what.

"There are a lot of mistaken uses of the term 'vintage,'" said Strauss, whose company makes the Romeo y Julieta Vintage distributed by its Hollco-Rohr subsidiary. "There is a lot of hocus pocus in the cigar business in regard to the term 'vintage.'"

Part of the difficulty applying the word vintage to a cigar is that cigar makers, unlike wine producers, typically don't use tobacco from a single region or even a single year when they make a cigar blend. The success of a cigar depends on the blending of different tobaccos to achieve a distinctive, characteristic flavor. Cigars often are blended with tobaccos grown in different years and even different countries. In Tabacalera's case, vintage is arguably more than a marketing ploy, but there are boundaries to its implications.

"I don't see us ever using the term 'vintage' with a specific year," Strauss said. "A quality cigar has to have a consistent blend. The idea that you can have a cigar will all of its tobacco coming from a specific year is fiction. You can do it, but it's probably not going to be a good cigar.

"In the Romeo y Julieta, we use all top-of-the-line raw material. And our problem is that it is so top-of-the-line that we continually run into shortages. Right now we are not making any vintage cigars because we don't have certain types of tobacco. And it's not only the type of tobacco, but the aging that the tobacco goes through also that makes a vintage cigar."

Along with the Romeo y Julieta, the best known of the vintage cigars is the Macanudo Vintage, manufactured by General Cigar Co., where a distinctly different approach to blending is utilized. General has created four Macanudo year-labeled vintages — 1979, 1984, 1988, and 1993 — and expects to designate another one later this year, probably for the year 1996.

"We won't know until the aging process is complete," said Steve Raye, General's director of marketing. The vintage year on Macanudos indicates the year that the Connecticut shade wrapper was grown. The filler and binder contain the same tobaccos that the regular Macanudo is being made from the year the vintage cigars are produced.

General produced only 50,000 Macanudo Vintage Cabinets from the 1979 crop, but increased production to over one million for the 1993 Macanudo Vintage Cabinet. And that is another characteristic of a vintage cigar. "The crop tells us how much we can make," Raye said.

"A Macanudo Vintage cigar will have all the hallmark qualities of a Macanudo, with added refinement and complexity," he said. And each will have slightly different characteristics from the earlier vintages because of unique soil, weather, and growing conditions.

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