Interiors| TENGOAL Cigars
Some Cubans took their expertise to
the Dominican Republic and so typically brands such as Cohiba, Romeo y Julieta and Montecristo each really have two brands with the same name: one from Cuba, the other from elsewhere in Central America. Magali, in talking about the very best,
singles out a single Coimbra Behike 2006 Limited Edition cigar which was designed to celebrate the brand’s 40th anniversary and which could set you back a mere £5,000. Cohiba is generally the most expensive and widely considered to be the best. “After all”, she says, “it’s the only brand involving three fermentation processes, and it’s the name chosen by Fidel Castro himself for the brand in 1966 as he himself used to smoke it”. “Montecristo is the best seller says
worldwide,” Yadira Bulnes, a
Cuban director at Hunter and Frankau, importers and distributors of the finest Cuban Cigars since 1790. Other best sellers include Cohiba,
of course, and Hoyo de Monterrey and Partagas, which has one of the oldest factories and strongest
cigar flavours.
Romeo y Julieta has a similar history, being originally produced in Cuba in 1885 and quickly becoming a top brand. As for the process from field to factory
"The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar" EVELYN WAUGH
“Cuban cigars are still the best in
world." So says Magali de la Cruz, the Cuban expert at Mayfair’s famous Sautter shop. “It’s all to do with their aroma and the complexity of flavour that comes from using just a pure leaf rather than the blending of different leaves that you get from Cuba’s rival Central American neighbours." When the communists came in
1960 the licences were stopped. The government nationalised the cigar industry and took over all of the cigar companies, Cuban and non-Cuban. Cubatabaco was formerly the worldwide distribution company and now it’s done by Habanos S.A. the state-owned entity that owns all of Cuba’s cigar brands.
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to harbour it is long and technical. With the Caribbean heat beating down, it places great demands on the "zafadores", the workers who sort the tobacco leaves into types of tobacco, size and colour. Then there are the ways they are rolled
by the torcedor (cigar maker), employing a mixture of different types of tobacco in a cigar, including up to five types of filler
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