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February 1999 Volume 26 Number 1 |
To add to the confusion about vintage cigars, Tony Borhani Cigars Inc. dates its Bahia Vintage cigars based on the year that the filler and binder were grown, unless it is Borhani's Bahia Vintage Maduro, which is designated according to the year the wrapper is grown. Even so, it's not an arbitrary distinction. "The logic behind that is, with the natural vintage cigars, it is the filler and the binder that give the cigar its characteristics," Borhani said. "In the maduro, it is the wrapper that gives the cigar most of its flavor." Zaretsky said that there should be some guidelines to help the consumer understand what a vintage cigar is. "Anybody coming out with a cigar could call it vintage," Zaretsky said. "I think there should be a standard, but I don't know who would establish it. The real answer is that 95 percent of the time ,the term 'vintage' is bullshit. The other five percent of the time, you don't know if it's bullshit." Although Fuente Newman Co. uses the word 'vintage' on some Arturo Fuente Hemingway, 858, and Don Carlos brands, the term is applied only for bookkeeping and inventory purposes for Fuente Newman cigars that are sold at duty-free stores around the world. Otherwise, it's the same cigar sold in smoke shops throughout the country. "We don't use the term vintage because we consider all of our cigars to be vintage," said Fred Zaniboni, sales manager of Fuente Newman Co. "The Fuentes are extremely careful about all the tobacco they put into their cigars.
Vintage cigars often are produced in limited quantities and typically range in price between $5 and $15, although Macanudo vintages that are no longer available for distribution are likely to be priced higher on the smoke shop shelf than General's suggested retail price. "The market has become very, very price competitive," Zaretsky said. "There are still a lot of excess cigars on the market and people are hesitant to pay a high price, even for an excellent cigar." Special packaging also is frequently involved. In 1998, Tabacalera produced 10,000 special edition Romeo y Julieta Vintage and packaged them in custom-designed Prometheus humidors containing 100 cigars each. U.S. Cigar Sales sells its Astral Grand Reserve Vintage in varnished solid cedar boxes of 15, packaged in corked glass tubes.
"We don't know how much longer it will last," said House of Oxford President Mark Goldman said. And when the wrapper runs out? "My guess is we will use the name again and start over. I can't replace the tobacco that I had, but we will find something equally as good. And we'll probably have different sizes to differentiate between the two vintages."
Unique to Cigars "I can't foresee a wine-like chart that says 1972 was a great year, but don't buy the 1974 because it was a down year," Goldman said. "What happens with cigars more than it does for wine is that intelligent smokers will find cigars for their particular taste. If people like the taste of a cigar, who cares when it was made.?"
"When people think about vintage product, they think about a product that has been sitting in an aging barn for years and year and years. That's just not true for any cigar. We do age the leaf three to four times longer than normal. That's why I consider it to be in the vintage category. "The key to the Royal Vintage, though, is its blend — I call it 'true blended.' The natural contains four distinctive fillers from two countries and a shade-grown Connecticut wrapper. The Butera Vintage maduro has tobacco from four countries and a naturally cured Connecticut broadleaf wrapper." When the 1992 Indonesian wrapper used to make the Astral Grand Reserve Vintage is gone, U.S. Cigar Sales Inc. will likely choose a wrapper from another year to create another vintage, said Dickson Farrington, U.S. Cigar's vice president of cigar sales. "We have another good crop from 1989, but there's not as much of it," he said.
If you have other vintage labels in your humidor and you don't know what they mean, make sure the manufacturer gives you a comprehensive explanation. Your customers count on your expertise, and chances are, when it comes to vintage, they probably have it only half right.
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"Let's say that we used the term vintage in a cigar that we made from tobacco grown in 1991. When we run of out 1991 tobacco, does that mean the tobacco that we use next year in the same cigar isn't as good? If it's not as good, we won't use it. Cigars are a blend of tobaccos. And some of the Fuente tobacco goes back to the early 1980s."
Although House of Oxford doesn't put a date on the Nestor 747 Vintage, supplies of the 1989 Ecuadorian wrapper that has been used to make the cigar since its debut in 1992 are dwindling.
When renowned Texas pipe maker Mike Butera, president of Butera International Corp., decided in 1992 to start up a cigar brand he borrowed the name for his natural and maduro Butera Royal Vintage cigars from a popular line of pipes. "I consider it a vintage cigar, but I don't promote it as vintage," Butera said. "I used the name Royal Vintage for my highest end pipe. I just carried that name over the cigar product.
