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Home > What's New > Dating Cigars
Dating Cigars
Posted: Friday, February 10, 2006
By David Savona
Box top from the La Flor Dominicana 2000 Series cigar made in 1998.
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The other day I smoked a eight-year-old La Flor Dominicana 2000 Series cigar. It was delicious, refined, balanced and elegant. I enjoyed it much more than I had when it was a young cigar. Clearly the age had given it a certain something that just wasn't there in its youth.
How did I know it was eight years old? Right there, printed on the cover of the box, was a star, inside of which appeared the words "rolled in 1998." Can't get much clearer than that.
If that box of cigars had been a bottle of wine, the date would have been nothing to talk about. But what makes a date on a cigar box so unique is that so few cigarmakers include such information.
The Cubans date every box, but they'd prefer that the consumer not know the date: such information used to be encrypted. The first time I went to Cuba, in 1996, I sat with our European editor, James Suckling, in the Havana offices of Habanos S.A. as he explained to a Habanos official how we at Cigar Aficionado were about to print two words that were certain to infuriate him -- NIVEL ACUSO. At that time, NIVEL ACUSO was a secret code known only to a few. The letters in the words corresponded with the numbers one through zero. With the code, you could decipher when your cigars were packaged, and therefore determine their age. It was key information to collectors, but something the Cubans didn't want to see the light of day.
We published the code in one of the earliest copies of Cigar Insider. The Cubans were so outraged that they soon changed the code, which was also broken. (We published that one as well.) Nowadays they still keep the factory code a mystery (and they change it regularly), but they've given up on disguising the dates. Flip over a box of Cuban cigars and you'll see an easily identifiable date.
Still, even that stamp is not the bold age statement that appears prominently on virtually every bottle of wine, or on those La Flor Dominicanas. Why the mystery? Why is Litto Gomez, the maker of La Flor Dominicanas, one of the few cigarmakers willing to date his boxes, at least some of them? One of the other cigarmakers doing this is Pepin Garcia, the owner of El Rey de Los Habanos, the small Miami factory that makes phenomenal Cubanesque cigars such as Tatuaje and Padilla 8&11. The bottom of Pepin's boxes contains a date stamp, just like a box of Habanos.
When I get a box of cigars, I write the date on the bottom. I wish I had the patience to age all my smokes -- I don't -- but when I do I'm typically pleased with the results. I love a good aged cigar. Many people do. (Some people think aging a cigar is hogwash, which is their prerogative.) The editors of Cigar Aficionado magazine smoke and rate aged cigars in every issue in a column called Connoisseur's Corner, and the results can be amazing. The highest scores we've ever given are for aged cigars -- including a few perfect 100-point scores.
Dating each box would make it easier for cigar collectors, and it would encourage people to age their smokes. I hope more cigarmakers join the Cubans, Gomez and Garcia, and start dating their boxes.
Until then, I'll be marking each box with a pen.
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