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| A PEPPERY NEW BLEND FROM PEPIN |
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Page 1 of 2  Plus: Good import figures continue for FebruaryLas Vegas, NV, April 24 – There’s little doubt that Jose “Pepin” Garcia is the hottest cigar maker on the planet right now. But why would he make a mixed-filler cigar? Because his friends at Ashton Distributors asked for a new cigar that not only had plenty of flavor, but could be sold at a modest retail price to make the blend available to everyone. Following up on the enormous success of his San Cristobal blend for Ashton, he’s now produced a new gem that’s priced at just $2.60 to $2.90 per cigar! It’s called Benchmade and it is just now being shipped to stores after being delivered from Garcia’s Tabacalera Cubana in Esteli, Nicaragua. It’s a mixed-fill blend made from all-Nicaraguan-grown tobaccos, featuring a Sumatra-seed wrapper. It has a double binder and a mixed filler of long and short filler from five different types of leaves. Finished with a distinctive pigtail head, the Benchmade line will start with four sizes: Robusto, Toro, Churchill and Cazadore, all offered in elegant wooden chests of 25 cigars each. At less than $3 each – not including local sales and tobacco taxes – it’s accessible to anyone. And it’s a real blend, notes Ashton Distributors Executive Vice President Manny Ferraro. Our first taste of Benchmade showed a medium-to-full body and a rich peppery flavor from the start, but never bitter or overpowering. There’s a spicy aroma and an excellent draw; the taste calms in the second half with less spice and a caramelized note towards the end. It burned well and the ash showed no tendency to crumble as with some other mixed-fill brands and for the price, has to be considered a very nice value indeed. Retailers apparently think so, too. The first shipment was sold out before formal sales sheets could be prepared, but more are on the way. Cigar imports stay strong in February: Cigar makers and distributors are wary that 2008 might not be as successful a year as those of the recent past, but cigar imports are showing good strength in the newest report from the Cigar Association of America. Although 2007 and prior years’ data has been overstated by some amount due to the inclusion of high-end little cigars in the counts, the February 2008 import figure of 20.8 million is quite respectable. That’s down 9.8 percent from February 2007, but remember that the 2007 figure includes an unknown number of little cigars in the count. For the first two months of 2008, total imports of premium cigars were down by just 6.3 percent over last year, at 32.3 million. As usual, the Dominican Republic led the import parade. The largest cigar-producing nation in the world contributed about 9.1 million premium cigars to the U.S. import total for February, easily the largest among the “big three” cigar-exporting nations. |
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Did you know?
“An underrated contributor to the 1990s Cigar Boom was Paul Garmirian's 1990 classic "The Gourmet Guide to Cigars".
