Cigars, Cigar Information and where to find Premium Cigars, Discounted Cigars and even Cheap Cigars - LONDON’S SOHO: A LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE OF SMOKING?

LONDON’S SOHO: A LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE OF SMOKING?

LONDON’S SOHO: A LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE OF SMOKING?

Plus: the First Churchill was . . . French?

Los Angeles, December 23 – The anti-tobacco craze is moving strongly in Britain, where smoking in public places has been banned, but where the future might also be on display.

Two new “smoking venues” have opened in the trendy Soho area of London, which couple the traditional pleasures of smoking, eating and drinking, but in different establishments which are all part of the same complex.

Cigar Buyer magazine calls the grouping “the brand new centre for Cuban hedonism” with a La Casa del Habano with both a fully-stocked cigar store and lounge, the spectacular new “Floridita London” from renowned restauranteur Sir Terence Conran (yes, based on the Havana Floridita) and a live music club underneath them both on the site of the old Marquee Club.

The musical performances are Cuban-themed, beginning at 9:30 or 10 p.m. and continuing to 3 a.m. with a late-night cabaret and plans to bring Cuban artists such as Eliades Ochoa of the famed Buena Vista Social Club to the stage in 2005.

The Floridita restaurant is non-smoking, as is the music club, but diners can retire to the Casa del Habano after dinner for spirits and cigars, then run downstairs to dance to the Latin beat ‘til daybreak.

It’s a formula which we think will be repeated again and again in the future with smokeshops teaming with restaurants, bars and smaller performance venues to bring these pleasures together in one place, but in separate venues.

Who will be the first to franchise this concept?

Cigar Imports Hit the Skids:
What happened?

The seemingly unstoppable rise in cigar imports to the U.S. came to a halt in October, as year-vs.-year imports actually dropped in comparison to 2003. It was the first time in 11 months that imports dropped.

However, the year-to-date totals are still impressive with 247.7 million premium cigars imported through the end of October, still on pace for the best year since the end of the Cigar Boom in 1998 and 11.33% ahead of 2003. In fact, it’s still likely that imports will hit 300 million for the full year, a level approached only during the Boom years of 1997 (417.77 million) and 1998 (334.58 million). It will be the fifth straight year of overall increases in the import market and the ninth in the last 11 years.

For the month of October 2004, 29.25 million cigars were imported, 11.5% less than the 2003 total of 33.04 million.

The cost of cigars from the factory has remained steady, which is good news for smokers. The average value of cigars imported from the Dominican Republic has increased only 0.5% from 2003 to 92.9 cents per cigar. Prices from Honduras increased a similar amount to 74.8 cents per cigar and the average for Nicaraguan imports actually dropped by 4.1% to just 51.5 cents a cigar for the first ten months of the year.

Steals and Deals:
Almost holiday time and our friends at BestCigarPrices.com: have some surprises you can put under your tree . . . or in your humidor. They’ve happily jumped on the sampler-pack bandwagon with both feet:

• Excalibur Royal Sterling Fortis (7 1/4 x 54 double corona), now available in packs of five for $24.60, an excellent way to try this new blend.

• La Flor Dominicana Reserva Especial Belicosos (5 1/2 x 52 torpedos) in a pack of five for $23.95.

• La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero 600 (5 1/4 x 52 robusto), a must-try, in packs of five for $30.78.

• Lone Wolf “Wolfpack” bundles, an excellent value in a mild-to-medium-bodied cigar, in bundles of 25 for $23-24 depending on size (four available).

• Macanudo Hyde Park – the original line – just $18.00 for a five-pack of the industry’s standard robusto (5 1/2 x 49).

• Roly No. 2 (6 1/2 x 46), one of the best values in all of cigardom, only $18.95 for a bundle of 25 by the makers of Puros Indios.

Have a Clemenceau!
Writer James Leavey left us a noteworthy piece of history in his story on Churchill-sized cigars in Cigar Buyer.

It’s well-known that the “Churchill” size was created by the Romeo y Julieta factory in the 1940s, a 7-inch-long cigar with a ring gauge of 47. In fact, the Cuban factory shape name used today for this size is “Julieta 2.”

However, Leavey notes that this size had actually been made by Romeo y Julieta since the late 1910s as a tribute to then-French Prime Minister Georges “The Tiger” Clemenceau (above), who led the French delegation at the post-World War I conference at Versailles. Romeo y Julieta Clemenceaus were made right along with Churchills – both identical in size – until being discontinued by Cubatabaco in the late 1980s.

You can still enjoy this tribute to the man who helped place crushing terms on Germany that led to the rise of Nazism and the Second World War, in the Dominican-made Romeo y Julieta line. The size is a little smaller at 6 inches by 50 ring and is offered in aluminum tubes in boxes of 10. It’s a perfect way to tell your Francophone friends that Clemenceau is still burning.
~ Rich Perelman

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