The question came up recently about why cigars aren’t marked with vintages. The answer is simple, but also a little complicated.
The most commonly accepted definition of 'vintage' applies to wine. The term itself comes from the word 'vintner', which has its roots in the Latin word for wine. Today, 'vintage' usually refers to the year in which the grapes were grown. According to wine maker Lee Fuqua, wines in the
U.S.
have to contain at least 95 percent of grapes from a stated year to be called a vintage. In other words, there are strict standards. There are also a lot of vintners.
California
alone boasts about 3,800 wine makers, and there is at least one winery in every state (yes, even
Alaska
and
Hawaii
).
Vintages used to be very important. For example, the weather conditions in
Portugal
could vary dramatically from one year to another, thereby affecting the grapes used to make that country’s Port. So the Portuguese vintners would declare a vintage year only for their very best Ports. But honestly, today, the science of wine making allows very good wines to be made even in marginal growing years. However, Fuqua says that some wines, like top-flight
Bordeaux
, are not meant to be opened right away. Instead, he adds, they need to be aged another 10 to 30 years before drinking. That kinda makes knowing the vintage important.
But if cigars are the end result of an agricultural process, like wine, why aren’t there more actual vintages for them too? The simple answer is that there are no standards for vintages in cigars. Pete Johnson of
Tatuaje Cigars says the lack of standards in the cigar industry makes declaring a vintage difficult. He then drops another question into the equation: what determines the vintage, the wrapper or just one leaf? Johnson has been outspoken about some cigar makers who 'discover' a bale of tobacco from 1970, and then say their cigars are from that vintage.
Johnson adds that all of his boxes made by Pepin (Don Pepin Garcia) have box dates on them. But he says the dates don’t tell you what crop was used, nor even when the cigars were made. They only tell you when the cigars were boxed.
Now, there are plenty of cigars called 'vintage'. But in this case, the word is often used as an adjective meaning something of high quality - or at least that is what the promotional material says. Others use 'vintage' to denote something older, like vintage clothing. The Reyes Cigar Family is using the latter definition for its Vintage line (which is replacing the Viejo line), in this instance meaning the cigars are older with more aging time under their belts prior to release.
One of the goals of fine cigar making is to create a stick with similar flavor year after year. To quote
San Antonio
cigar maker Bill Finck, Sr., “A cigar must be consistent. You could theoretically make a cigar that tastes like crap, but someone would buy it as long as it always tasted like crap.”
Face it... Most cigar smokers do not want to buy their favorite stick only to find it varies greatly from year to year. Furthermore, it is doubtful that casual smokers would want to buy a cigar only to be told it needed to be aged several years before smoking. Part of the art of cigar making is in knowing how to ferment each year’s tobacco to maintain consistency. Some years, the tobacco is heavier. Other years, it's lighter. Knowing how to cure it is a key factor. And another important part lies in being able to blend crops from different years in order to achieve that desired consistency.
Now, that is not to say there aren’t vintage cigars in the wine sense. In the case of the Macanudo Vintage 2000, Daniel Núñez designated that year’s Connecticut Shade wrapper as a vintage. And that is what they are using. But unlike wine, where you know immediately in the field that the grapes are good, tobacco takes more time to reveal its quality. Núñez waited 5 long years, as the curing and fermentation took place, before being certain the wrapper crop was good enough to become a 'vintage' one.
Over at La Aurora, the staff knew the 2003 crop was terrific. But again, what looks good in the field may not turn out the way you expected it to. So again, after 5 years of careful evaluation, curing and fermentation, the company released the 2003 Puro Vintage (in 2008). This limited production Salamone uses wrapper, filler and binder all from 2003 - a true vintage cigar.
"But what about Cuban cigars," I hear you ask. It's true that all Cuban cigar boxes are dated. This lets you know when they were made. But that date tells you absolutely nothing about what crop is being used, let alone from what year. Nonetheless, since
Cuban cigars
are well known for going through 'sick periods', the date does at least help to let you know when they are ready to smoke. (The box of Rafael Gonzalez says smoke within a month or let them mature for about one year.) Most domestic makers age their cigars, so there is no 'sick period' after the tobacco has been rolled. (The 'sick period' happens when ammonia is released as the cigar continues to ferment due to the water used on the wrapper in rolling.)
Another aspect of Cuban box codes involves the way these particular cigars are sold. The marketing of Cuban cigars remains very different from what one encounters in U.S. stores. In most parts of the world, cigar smokers tend to buy boxes, not singles.
While some makers in
Honduras
, the Dominican Republic and
Nicaragua
do in fact offer manufacturing dates on (or inside) their cigar boxes, retailers don’t take kindly to customers turning those boxes over to read the date codes. Doing it to a half-full box could damage the cigars inside, after all.
Perhaps not such a simple answer to that opening question, after all.
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Frank Seltzer (Mowee) is a former network correspondent who now owns a media consulting company in Dallas, TX. A regular cigar smoker since 1973, he runs the DFW Cigar Society that has almost 300 members who get together twice a month to trade smokes and lies. He also runs away as often as he can to his condo in Maui...hence the name Mowee (which btw was the way Captain Cook originally spelled the island when he heard Hawaiians speak it.)
