Cigars in Dante’s Inferno?
It takes capital, guts and some industry knowledge to design and launch a brand of cigars. Some retailers want to surpass just selling sticks and the more adventurous of them invest their own capital and enter the production side. One retailer in the DC area did just that and launched the Dante brand, named after Dante’s Divine Comedy where the nine circles of Inferno (Italian for hell) are...
This Julius Caesar is from Tampa.
We have all seen those pictures from the late 1800’s – well-dressed men smoking “fine” cigars wherever they were. Cigars and brandy in the drawing room after dinner was a social tradition. Back then Tampa was the cigar capital of the US. Meanwhile in 1895 in Cleveland, Hungarian immigrant JC Newman was rolling his own brand of cigars for the locals. Then in 1954 he moved the operations...
A “Truthful” Cigar
A relatively new cigar company, called Veritas Cigars, is in the market. For those like me not holding a college degree in Classical literature, Veritas was the Roman goddess of truth. It is not clear how this goddess relates to the company or its cigars, but the band for the Torch series by Veritas does have a hand holding up a cigar apparently in protest – often a symbol for supporting a...
A Crazy Cigar From Ventura
Ventrua Cigars appears to be new on the cigar scene but the truth is that its parent, Kretek International, has been selling to thousands of cigar stores and tobacco outlets for decades. Kretek’s main product is clove cigarettes and Ventura is their official branching into premium label cigars. You may also know Kretek for their Djeep lighters. The Ventura moniker comes from the name of the...
Rodrigo’s G 6
A Big Boutique Blend Cigar We have recently reviewed a couple of Rodrigo’s cigars (Lancer and Cinco 5) and now add his Boutique Blend to the list. George Rodriguez began Rodrigo Cigars a short time ago in the Dominican Republic where he linked up with William Ventura, past master blender for Davidoff. All Rodrigo cigars are made in Tamboril, a municipality of Santiago in the Dominican...
This Prize fighter is Worth a Bet
Gurkha has a number of well-known brands and often releases new products under other recently established trade names. In this instance, Gurkha used its East India Trading Company to launch its Prize Fighter brand of cigars. The Prize Fighter is targeted as a “budget” medium bodied cigar with a blend of Connecticut shade Ecuadorian wrapper, around an Ecuadorian/Indonesian binder and a 3-year...
