 Plus: Houston group files to stop anti-smoking ordinance
Los Angeles, August 10 – Since its debut in 2000, the Cuban “Edicion Limitada” program has been a great success for Habanos, S.A., providing a focus for each year with the production of a relatively small program of high-profile, higher-priced cigars.
Altadis S.A. has caught the fever.
At the Retail Tobacco Dealers of America convention and trade show this week, two separate limited-edition programs debuted for retailer review:
• Altadis introduced a unique program called the Cabinet Seleccion which offers special blends of four different brands in five sizes each!
The series includes three groups made at the Tabacalera de Garcia in La Romana, Dominican Republic: H. Upmann, with an Ecuadorian-grown, Connecticut-seed wrapper; Montecristo with a Ecuadorian-grown, Sumatra-seed wrapper and Romeo y Julieta with a vintage Cameroon wrapper and one Honduran-made cigar: Por Larranaga with a Nicaraguan-grown wrapper.
All of these cigar series are identified with the same style band: a white background with gold and black detail and lettering. And all are packaged in slide-top wooden cabinets of 22 cigars each, presented uncellophaned!
• If that weren’t enough, Altadis U.S.A.’s best-selling premium brand, Romeo y Julieta, is now being offered in an Edicion Limitada of its own! This version has a Mexican-grown Corojo wrapper with a Nicaraguan binder and Dominican and Nicaraguan filler leaves for a full-bodied taste.
Three sizes are available, all double-banded in a style similar to that seen on the Havana-made Romeo y Julieta Churchill. And all three sizes – No. 2 (6 1/8-inch by 52-ring torpedo), Prominente (6 x 54) and Rothchilde (5 x 54) – are packaged in richly-decorated, ruby-red aluminum tubes.
It’s getting so that you can’t tell your Romeo y Julieta without a scorecard. In addition to the Cabinet Selection and the Edicion Limitada, Altadis U.S.A. also introduced the Romeo y Julieta Havana Reserve. It has a full body featuring a Nicaraguan wrapper and is offered in boxes of 27 in five sizes! Unlike all of its brethren, it’s made in Honduras at La Flor de Copan.
That’s not the first time that a Romeo line has been made in Honduras, however. When the brand was owned and operated by Hollco-Rohr before that company was acquired by Tabacalera of Spain in 1997, a delicious Romeo line was made in Honduras but saw very limited distribution in the U.S. That will not be the case with the new Havana Reserve line.
So now there are nine versions of the Romeo y Julieta brand: the original Romeo y Julieta 1875 blend, the Aniversario, Reserva Real, Reserve Maduro, Vintage, Vintage Maduro, Cabinet Selection, Edicion Limitada and the Havana Reserve! And that doesn’t count the Romeo y Julieta Viejo line made just for Cigars International . . .
New life for the famed Dunhill brand:
The history book says that Alfred Dunhill opened a soon-to-be-famous tobacco shop in London in 1907. So that makes this year the centennial of the Dunhill tobacco experience and the familiar Dunhill cigar brand is getting a new push.
Torano Cigars is now in charge of the brand and while the familiar Dunhill Dominican brand continues to be made (for now) by Altadis U.S.A. at its Tabacalera de Garcia facility in the Dominican Republic, the elegant Dunhill Signed Range is now under Torano control.
The new blend is being made in Esteli, Nicaragua with a full body and expensive tobaccos, including a Nicaraguan-grown wrapper, Cameroon binder and Dominican and Nicaraguan filler leaves. There are six sizes ranging from the Petit Corona (4 x 42) up to a full-sized Churchill (7 x 50) offered in packs of three, four or five up to boxes of 25.
Torano’s mission is to restore the Dunhill brand to the elite status it had at the start of the Cigar Boom and there is much work to do. But if the cigars are as good as advertised, it won’t be hard to sell smokers on the Dunhill name.
Houston sued over cigar-bar exemption to smoking ban:
While the RTDA was on at the George R. Brown Convention Center, the Federal courthouse was busy as the Houston Association of Alcoholic Beverage Permit Holders – bar, nightclub and cabaret owners – filed suit against the City of Houston’s upcoming smoking ban set to take effect in September.
The suit, according to Association attorney Al Van Huff, claims that the city does not have the authority, under Texas law, to create different regulations among businesses licensed to sell alcoholic beverages for consumption on the premises.
“They’re creating an unbalanced playing field,” said Van Huff to the Associated Press, “by stating that certain types of operators, such as tobacco bars, who meet their arbitrary definition of what a tobacco bar is, can allow smoking while the guy across the street (who) doesn’t meet that definition cannot.”
Predictably, the city disagrees. City Attorney Arturo Michel claims that the ordinance is legal. “We regulate a lot of other public places, in terms of smoking,” he told the AP.
The Association is asking for enforcement to the ordinance to be stopped, and to have it ruled invalid as to places which serve alcoholic beverages that are licensed by the state of Texas.
~ Rich Perelman
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