A Stronger Smoke
By Richard Carleton Hacker
The cigars we’re smoking are becoming more buff. Just look at this year’s Best of the Best winners: Full- and medium-full-strength smokes dominate, with the Montecristo 1935 Anniversary Nicaragua the lone representative on the podium for the medium-strength category. Absent entirely are any cigars from the mild or even medium-mild segments. Meanwhile, a number of popular smokes, such as the J. C. Newman Diamond Crown Maximus and the CAO Vision, have debuted intense new versions that not only grabbed our attention but made our list for the year’s best cigars.
That means so long candela cigars, with their ultra-mild yellow-green wrappers, and hello to the flavors of Jalapa and Estelí, two of Nicaragua’s most popular regions for producing the dark, muscular tobaccos used in many of today’s premium stogies. In fact, 6 of this year’s 10 Best of the Best winners come from Nicaragua and feature its characteristically rich, earthy tobaccos. And the trend holds outside of our curated selection: Over the past several years, for the first time Nicaragua has outpaced the Dominican Republic as the leading exporter of premium cigars to the US.
The gravitation to stronger smokes is the result
