Cigars, Cigar Information and where to find Premium Cigars, Discounted Cigars and even Cheap Cigars

PLENTY TO BE THANKFUL FOR

Plus: our Register & Win winner of the week!

Los Angeles, November 22 – In a year which could have seen the cigar industry turned into scrap at the hands of Congressional Democrats, there’s still a lot of be thankful for at this time of year. Near the top of our list are these:

• When has there been a better time to be a cigar lover?

Sure, the Cuban Embargo is still on, but the cigars coming from the big three – the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua – are among the best ever. There is plenty of aged leaf and an appetite in the American cigar market, by far the world’s largest, to try new things with richer, ever more complex flavors.

Americans were scoffed at in the 1950s for lacking a taste at the dinner table for anything other than steak and potatoes. Today’s tables are as likely to be loaded with sushi or quiche or snapper as beef or chicken. That same sophistication has come to cigars and will only continue.

American smokers who were derided for preferring Candela wrappers in the 1950s and 1960s – check out the cigars that show up in mid-60s episodes of “Hogan’s Heroes” for example – are now enjoying a full variety of cigar styles, which can still include candela-wrapped models, but also rich maduros and even jet-black oscuro cigars like the Bohemian Black line or the Partagas Black Label.

And the efforts in tobacco farming have been enormous. Consider John Vogel’s program to grow tobacco from actual Cuban seeds of the 1940s and 1950s in Costa Rica at the Tabacos de la Cordillera or the work in Corojo leaf from the Eiroas at Tabacos Rancho Jamastran in Honduras. The future is bright with the opportunity to blend new styles of cigars with even more complex flavors, even if the embargo doesn’t end soon. And if it does . . .

• Retailers and cigar marketers have never been more inventive.

As the price of cigars has risen – and will continue to rise – both manufacturers and retailers have become more creative, to the benefit of the consumers.

At the local, brick-and-mortar store level, more stores are stocking more different kinds of cigars than ever before and showcasing more brands with in-store events and promotions. Our exclusive list of retail promotions shows an enormous variety of events of all types and styles from every major (and most minor) manufacturers across the country, usually numbering in the hundreds each month. That’s bringing more brands into contact with more and more people.

Give special credit to General Cigar, however, for its dizzying array of programs for its line-up of top brands: bus tours for Macanudo, domino tournaments for La Gloria Cubana, personalized portraits for Punch, roulette nights for Partagas and so on. We have yet to see a sword-fighting tournament for Excalibur however. In 2008 perhaps?

At the national retail level, the emergence of five-packs is a welcome trend. As many top-of-the-line brands now insist on sales being made at their pre-set retail prices, without deviation (a consequence of the 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Leegin Creative Leather Products vs. PSKS, Inc. dba Kay’s Kloset announced on June 28), the street price of many cigar lines has gone up as much as 100 percent. But you can still enjoy them in smaller packs and some manufacturers – Ashton and Davidoff are two of the best examples – have integrated small pack sizes into their standard lines. Some national merchants have gone even further. J-R Cigars has created a series of samplers and eight-packs of several major brands, offered in reusable wood sleeves or in clamshell “folios” that look like small shopping bags. There is no end to the creativity and innovation in packaging and as brands fight for sales volume, more attention will go into this aspect.

• Accessory makers are beginning to stir.

There usually isn’t a lot to say about accessories such as cutters, lighters, humidors and the like. But there are signs that the cigar market is becoming more interesting to manufacturers who haven’t shown much interest in the past.

At the top of the list is Zippo, whose famed liquid-fuel lighters aren’t considered the best for cigars because of the odors attendant at lighting. But in 2007, Zippo created the ZippoBLU line of butane torch lighters, complete with a patented process for its famous wheel-spark ignition . . . in a torch! With 75 years of success in hand with conventional lighters, it’s not a project that was undertaken lightly. But it’s a sign that more innovations are on the way.

Even the humble cigar case has been improved. A small company, Andre Garcia Cases, created a new line that incorporates not just room for your cigars, but a cedar divider to protect from tumbling around inside and a zip-around section to store a cutter and lighter! Now, everything you need to enjoy your cigars is in one package.

• Thanks to everyone who is fighting the SCHIP legislation.

All cigar smokers owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Cigar Association of America, the International Premium Cigar and Pipe Retailers Association (formerly the RTDA), to the leadership of major manufacturers, to retailers of all sizes and to fellow smokers for the cumulative lobbying efforts against Congressional Democrats who threatened the industry with an enormous tax increase.

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is a worthwhile means of providing poor children with health insurance. Enacted in 1997, its authorization ended this year and the Democrat-controlled Congress decided to expand the program from covering about six million people (including 700,000 adults) to more than 10 million. The costs of the new, expanded SCHIP would be borne entirely by smokers with a 61-cent increase in the tax on a pack of cigarettes and similar increases on other tobacco products, including cigars and pipe tobacco. And worst of all, the federal tax cap on cigars would rise from the current 4.875 cents each to a proposed $10.00 each in the original Senate bill.

The bill that passed the Congress had a $3.00 cap, but was vetoed by U.S. President George W. Bush. There were enough votes to override the veto in the Senate, but not in the House thanks to the steadfast anti-tax stance of most of the Republican caucus.

The energy generated by millions of calls and e-mail messages to Representatives and Senators and the lobbying effort of the industry – including elected officials from cigar-making countries such as the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua – has helped to stop this bill so far. There is a lot more to be done in the future as the SCHIP issue isn’t dead and could be revived again before the end of the year.

But for now, it’s in hibernation as Bush has publicly promised another veto. Cigar smokers owe him quite a bit, too.

• Thanks to all of you who read CigarCyclopedia.com!

No amount of thanks can convey to you, our readers, our gratitude for your continuous interest and support.

From a standing start in 2004, this site will be visited more than 1.6 million times in 2007 with more than five million page views. About one of every eight cigar smokers in the U.S. will have visited the site at least once this year and we have readers in more than 65 countries.

Thank you.

And we have much more coming in 2008. A new feature, the “Cigar Gallery” will be debut with even more information about brands you know and brands you should know, a weekly video feature will be added and even more documentation and in-depth analysis will be available as our site is re-formatted. And with a little luck, we’ll be able to give away a lot more cigars and cigar stuff in 2008.

We’re looking forward to having even more of you along for the ride during the rest of 2007 and into 2008. Tell your friends; everyone is welcome!

And the winner is:
Congratulations to Robert Garretson of Dumont, New Jersey, winner of our “Register & Win” drawing for a free bundle of Cuban Sandwich Churchills from our Perelman, Pioneer & Company humidors, courtesy of Mike’s Cigars.

Up for your pleasure this week is an elegant box of 25 La Gloria Cubana Glorias Extras, made by hand in the Dominican Republic. They’re medium in body and offered in the near-perfect Grand Corona size of 6 1/4 inches by 46 ring gauge. They’re provided courtesy of our friends at General Cigar and will be awarded in our drawing to be held on Sunday, November 25.

To enter, just click on the “Register & Win” tab above and fill out the required information. If you have entered in the past, there is no need to re-enter; all past entries are carried forward to future drawings. You must be 21 or older to win; good luck!
~ Rich Perelman

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