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FUENTE AGED SELECTION RELEASED FOR 2007

Plus: Clinton and cigars don’t mix . . . in public

Los Angeles, October 17 – Keith Park is either a genius or one of the greatest salesmen of this generation.

The last thing the Tabacalera A. Fuente needed in 2004 was to create another cigar. The Fuentes were selling essentially every cigar they could make and had their hands full with orders for the standard lines, not to mention their popular Opus X brand.

But Park helped to create, with the Fuentes, two very unique, top-of-the-shelf lines that are not only expressions of the cigar maker’s art, but are perhaps more collector’s items than they are cigars for smoking, a rare achievement outside of Cuba.

The two lines are God of Fire and the Fuente Aged Selection, both distributed by Park’s Prometheus International, headquartered in a sleepy building in the mostly industrial setting of Commerce, California, south of Los Angeles.

Both brands are true limited editions, in which a specific number of cigars are made and when they’re gone, they’re gone. Park is now releasing the 2007 edition of the Fuente Aged Selection: three cigars created in 2006 by Carlos Fuente, Jr. (a.k.a. Carlito) in honor of his father Carlos celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Don Carlos line: a Robusto (5 1/4 inches by 50 ring), Double Robusto (5 3/4 x 52) and Toro (6 1/4 x 48).

Only 3,000 cigars of each size were distributed in 2006 (total of 9,000), but more are available in 2007 after a second year of aging. Park has packaged them in 800 specially-made humidors of 30 cigars each, with three trays of ten cigars provided in each box. That’s 8,000 of each size or 24,000 in total.

And there are three different finishes to choose from: Macassar Ebony (400), shiny Black (200) and Walnut (200). The price is high – $1,250.00 per humidor – but you get much more than a box of cigars: there are the cigars, the humidor plus a second, travel-size humidor and a new biography of Carlos Fuente with his unique story of perseverance through a lot of tough times before reaching today’s pinnacle of success.

The whole package is more of a collector’s item than simply a box of cigars.

The 2007 God of Fire series is being readied, to be highlighted by a set of tubed cigars and the first torpedo-shaped cigar in the series. As always, Park will have special, new packaging for this unique brand to help make it attractive.

Clinton, cameras and cigars don’t mix:
Reporter Orla Healy of The Independent of Dublin, Ireland was one of the troupe of media who was part of a preview of the new exhibition “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life” which opened this week in Washington, D.C.

She wrote that one of the portraits which drew considerable media interest was her 1993 shot of the newly-sworn-in Bill Clinton. According to Healy:

“Leibovitz talked about arriving in the Oval Office to shoot Bill Clinton during his first days in his new job. “‘When I walked in, he was smoking a cigar and had his feet up on his desk,’ she said, adding that when she asked him if he'd like to have the lit cigar in the shot, he replied, ‘Not in your wildest dreams.’ Cracking how ‘a different kind of cigar obviously became famous later,’ the openly liberal Leibovitz admitted she now wistfully views the 1993 photo as ‘a picture of promise and a picture of regret . . . a picture of all the things that we were promised that we didn't get.’”

Leibovitz makes a worthwhile point. Although an admitted cigar smoker, has anyone ever seen a picture of Clinton with a cigar?

Clinton did make gifts of cigars occasionally. Former Republican Senator and current Presidential candidate Fred Thompson received a cigar from Clinton in 1997 that’s now part of his archive housed at the University of Tennessee.

According to a story in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Thompson wrote to Clinton with thanks for a cigar Clinton sent to him and noted “I had a fight with my staff as to whether I should smoke the cigar or keep it as a memento from the President. We compromised. I am keeping the tube it came in.”

High tech comes to tobacco sales?
According to the British Tobacco Manufacturer’s Association, sales of counterfeit cigarettes cost tobacco companies about 800 million British pounds or roughly $1.63 billion U.S. annually, not to mention 3.5 billion pounds ($7.1 billion) in taxes!

So the major British manufacturers – British American Tobacco, Philip Morris, Imperial Tobacco and Gallaher – have underwritten a new technology that places microchips with embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) tags in packs of cigarettes distributed in Britain since October 1.

“The scheme provides an instant authentication method” said the TMA in a statement and is designed to combat tobacco smuggling and counterfeiting which now takes up about three percent of the British tobacco market. The tobacco companies expect that the national customs office will use the chips as a way to begin cornering the counterfeit market and whether taxes have been paid on any specific pack.

From the Cubador:
The heavy rains that eastern Cuba has experienced over the past month have had some impact on tobacco production schedules in the Las Tunas province. Cuban news agencies have reported that about three million seedlings have been deteriorating that were supposed to have been planted in October.

The rains will delay planting in Las Tunas for about 40 days, but with better weather in the late fall and winter, a record crop of 1,500 tons is hoped for. Although the quality of Las Tunas tobacco is not considered on a par with that of western Cuba (especially Pinar del Rio), it is used for cigarettes, for export to be blended with leaves from other countries in cigars for the European market and for some brands of domestic cigars. The Las Tunas region is now the fourth-largest producer of tobacco in the country behind Pinar del Rio, Villa Clara and Sancti Spiritus.
~ Rich Perelman

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