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

HAMMER TIME

Plus: past and future for Bolivar . . . and for cigar making in Utah?

Los Angeles, May 12 – Despite the ban on auctions of tobacco products, Fuente Fuente Opus X cigars are drawing the interest of bidders again with pricing maintained at the $20 per cigar level in an auction ended Tuesday.

A sealed box of Opus X Perfecxion No. 2 (6 3/8 x 52) drew 12 bids and a final price of $587.77 for 29 cigars from a seller in South Elgin, Illinois. That’s $20.27 a stick, just about the recent average for the brand at auction.

There are a couple more Opus X boxes up for auction right now:

• A sealed box of Opus X Super Belicoso (5 1/2 x 52) is available with a starting bid of $450 for the 29 cigars, with the auction ending on May 17 at 5:45 a.m. Pacific time. (You can spend freely; eBay will help you finance your purchase! Yikes!)

• The unique 22-cigar Cigar Family Charitable Foundation box, regularly $750 when you can find it, is also up, ending on May 17, but at 9:19 p.m. Pacific time. The bidding started at $58, but seven bidders have driven the price up to $586.51 with five days remaining.

Even more amazing is a box of counterfeit Opus X on auction! The item is clearly identified as counterfeit by the Michigan-based seller, but it’s already received one bid at the starting price of $50.

The box does not even come close to resembling an Opus X box, and has a glass top with a picture of Carlos and Carlito Fuente dropped inside for “authenticity”!? There are 25 cigars, made in the Dominican Republic according to the stamp on the side of the box. The bands look somewhat like the real Opus X bands, but they appear to be poor copies.

Now I’ve seen everything!

There was one Padron 1926 Serie 40th Anniversary Humidor sold last week on eBay for the “Buy It Now” price of $1,900 in about a day and a half. The final amount was somewhat less than other recent auctions had brought, however, the amount still prices out to $47.50 per cigar for the 40 cigars included, without allocating anything for the custom-carved humidor. At that rate, Padron’s 40th Anniversary cigars retain their title as the most “sought-after” in the U.S. at present.

Big news for Bolivar?
General Cigar has been dropping big teaser ads for a new blend of Bolivar, but the product is not yet finalized, but still being refined.

General has owned the trademark for Bolivar in the U.S. since 1969 and filed for a special version of the mark in 2004 which treated the lettering like General’s logo for its “red-dot” Cohiba mark. It’s unknown whether that registration was a back-up in case of a loss of the still-pending Cohiba trademark case against Cubatabaco, or whether it will be used for the new Bolivar blend.

Marketing of the brand has been low-key with its primary visibility in the J-R Cigars catalog, as well as for a special blend for J-R, the “Bolivar Fuerte.”

Whatever the logo on the new blend looks like, the new Bolivar is scheduled for shipment in September following the Retail Tobacco Dealers of America (RTDA) Convention and International Trade Show in New Orleans this August. Stay tuned!

Utah remembers local cigar factories:
Turns out even the state of Utah had cigarmakers, once upon a time.

Salt Lake Tribune writer Roger McDonough found an 1898 fire insurance map of Salt Lake City that showed an entire row of cigar factories turning out handmade cigars with tobacco grown in the south . . . of Utah!

Cigar rolling was a job filled by younger workers and often children. There were factories in Salt Lake City, Provo, Ogden and Corinne and according to McDonough’s research, the industry was dominated by Chinese immigrants who had come for the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, completed in 1869. The region’s top company at the turn of the 20th Century was Columbia Club Cigars, producing more than a million a year. The top brands included names you would expect to be popular in Utah and surrounding states:

> Columbia Club (made in Ogden);

> Henry VI (made in Provo);

> Mormon Girl (yes, really!; they were made in Salt Lake City);

> Provo Girl (made in Provo).

McDonough noted whispers about the return of hand-rolling to Utah as developer Rick Howa considers expanding into production at his Havana Brothers Cigars store in Salt Lake City. Will he re-issue Mormon Girl?

And if a new band is produced, who will be the Mormon Girl . . . on a cigar label?
~ Rich Perelman

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