By: CHARLIE MINATO Posted on: JUNE 12, 2019 Last month, Tabacalera Padilla opened its doors in Estelí, Nicaragua. The new factory is a partnership between Ernesto Padilla and Osvani Hernandez, a Cuban-born agronomist who has been making cigars in Nicaragua for a few years. Padilla told halfwheel that the new factory will make some of the company’s lines, including Padilla 1932, Padilla Miami and the new Padilla Barrel Proof. He also said the factory wouldn’t produce more than 800,000 cigars per year. Read more…
Author: MylesK
Posted on June 4, 2019 By: Denise Davis El Septimo Geneva SA, a La Grande Maison Younan Collection company, has introduced the Alexandra Collection: a new line of cigars designed exclusively for women. The premium cigar and tobacco company is known for breaking boundaries by creating new products to meet and exceed the growing demand of premium cigar smokers. El Septimo’s Alexandra Collection is blended exclusively for women, recognizing that they share the same desire as men to enjoy the cigar lifestyle, but have different responses when tasting for the perfect cigar. Read more…
Posted on May 17, 2019 By Gregory Mottola What was once a limited-edition cigar will now be available all year. Oliva Cigars will be presenting its Serie V Maduro brand at the IPCPR trade show next month as a regular-production cigar line. Since 2008, Oliva has been releasing its Serie V Maduros once a year on a limited basis, but after the upcoming trade show, it will be part of the regular portfolio and offered in four sizes: a Double Robusto, measuring 5 inches by 54 ring gauge; Toro, 6 by 50; Torpedo, 6 by 54; and Double Toro, 6 by 60. Read…
BY: CARLY WEEKS HEALTH REPORTER PUBLISHED: MAY 1, 2019 Tobacco products in Canada must be sold in packages that are brown, devoid of all colours and logos and feature large, graphic health warnings, according to new federal rules that health experts say are the toughest in the world. The plain-packaging regulations, which were announced Wednesday and will come into force at retail stores next February, are a key pillar in the federal government’s strategy to reduce tobacco use among Canadians to less than 5 per cent of the population by 2035. Read more…
Post by Charlie Minato @charlieminato On April 12, 2019 The latest entry in S.T.Dupont’s Art Icon Series will honor and draw inspiration from Claude Monet. As with the previous releases centered around other renowned artists, it will include a variety of accessories that feature art from Monet, this time Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), a painting from 1872. Six different pieces are part of the collection: a lighter, a pipe, three pens and a passport cover. The company says that it used the same natural pigments as the original painting. Those are applied by hand as part of the S.T.Dupont’s signature lacquer process.…
Posted on April 8, 2019 By David Savona Break out the square-toed shoes, put Nirvana on the sound system and crack open a Zima: the U.S. cigar industry has the look of the late-1990s. The final numbers for 2018 are in and imports of premium, handmade cigars rose 9.7 percent, to 362 million units, the best year for imports since 1997, the final days of the 1990s cigar boom. Powered by exceptionally robust shipments of cigars from Nicaragua, the leading producer of handmade cigars for the American cigar market, this marked the fourth year in a row where premium cigar imports…
By Charlie Minato @charlieminato Posted on April 8, 2019 For the last few years S.T.Dupont has talked about a new concept that would allow people to track their lighters in case they misplaced it. Now, the first of those lighters has been released in the U.S. The S.T.Dupont Line 2 007 Connecting Lighter ($2,674) takes the company’s iconic Line 2 lighter and adds an internal Bluetooth module called D-Tag. That connects to the Orbit App, a third-party universal tracking app available on iOS and Android; or S.T.Dupont’s D-Tag app, which is currently only available for Android devices. Read more…
Post on: March 11, 2019 By David Savona Cuba threw a huge party in February centered around the 50th birthday of the Trinidad brand, but that golden anniversary left many people scratching their heads. For most of its history Trinidad was a shrouded in secrecy and mystery. It didn’t become widely known until the 1990s, and the cigar as we know it today has only been sold since 1998. The first mention of Trinidad in the pages of Cigar Aficionado came in Autumn 1992, the first issue of the magazine, as a sidebar to a feature story on Cohiba. Called “Trinidad: The Best Kept Secret in Cuba,”…
By: Laurie Kahle Posted on: March 7, 2019 As Zenith marks the golden anniversary of its legendary El Primero chronograph movement this year, it also celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Trinidad cigar. The two companies have previously collaborated on Cohiba-themed limited editions and are now expanding the partnership to the Trinidad brand. Presented at last month’s 21st Habanos Festival in Havana, the new 45 mm Pilot Type 20 Chronograph Trinidad Edition comes in three variations: rose, yellow, and white gold, each limited to 50 pieces. The rich brown dials with contrasting sub-dials display large beige luminescent Arabic numerals, a distinctive tobacco leaf pattern, as…
By: David Savona Posted on: March 5, 2019 Punch cigars have been made for a long, long time, but until now the Cuban brand never had a 50-ring-gauge smoke in its regular-production portfolio. That’s all changing with the launch of the Punch Short de Punch, a short but fat smoke that expands this venerable Cuban brand, which has been made for more than 170 years. The new Punch Short de Punch, which was announced at the Habanos Festival two weeks ago, is 4 3/4 inches long by 50 ring, a size called Paraíso in Cuban cigar factories. It’s one of the shortest cigars…