Esteban Carraras, Fratello, Cordoba and Morales and Some Cigar News

I’ve been rummaging around the humidor more lately looking for interesting cigars, and I found an Esteban Carreras 10 Años Robusto. I received a pack of cigars a while back as an apology for something that they really had no reason to apologize for, it was a mystery to me really. I had bought a one time cigar of the month club sampler or something from them to try out and it all went well, and for some reason they thought it didn’t and sent this as some sort of consolation. Of course,  I accepted their gesture instead of making a stink about it, it was so long after the fact that I had no idea what it was for really. Anyway, this was probably the last cigar from that package which has been in the humidor for three years or more. The 10 Años was the first Esteban Carreras Ultra Premium Cigar, has a San Andrés Negro wrapper and Nicaraguan binder and fillers and comes in four box pressed sizes, this one was 5″ x 50. This is a great tasting cigar that could I could easily put in my rotation if I had one. Half way through there’s an interesting spiced candy flavor, and I’m going to have to get a bag of mixed “grandma” hard candies and find the candy I keep tasting in cigars and really digging.  I can’t put a finger on the name, but I come across it and really like it. I think I got it in the La Gloria Esteli White recently. This cigar was a real treat and I’ll happily smoke it again, and will look for some next time I’m at the local shop, which I know has some Esteban Carreras cigars.

I finally had occasion to sample the newest Fratello Navetta Inverso in the robusto size this week. This is an interesting project because Omar de Frias uses the same tobaccos in this as the Navetta, but he played with the primings and proportions and placements of the components, and it’s a totally different tasting cigar. This can actually be pretty efficient depending on how he has to buy tobaccos, making the best use of the leaf he has at hand. I could make clever jokes about how I took my evening walk the opposite route around the neighborhood, or I waited until Mercury went retrograde to smoke this, but this cigar is no joke. It’s medium bodied and smooth, rich and sophisticated, much like the Navatta. The Inverso has a Habano Nicaraguan wrapper, Ecuador binder and Dominican and Nicaragua filler, compared to the Navetta having an Ecuadorian Oscuro Wrapper, Dominican Binder and Nicaragua Filler. Like I said, there are different primings and variations on the same leaves in the two cigars, but they are different. I’ll need to smoke more of them to form a more informed opinion of course, but my initial impression was good!

Statement by Drew Newman, general counsel of J.C. Newman Cigar Co. and fourth-generation cigar maker:

“Today’s announcement is a huge relief for the premium cigar industry.  Because there are no standards for testing premium cigars, there was no way that our four generation, 124-year-old family business could meet FDA’s rapidly approaching November testing deadline.  FDA’s decision to extend the HPHC testing deadline until after the agency first issues guidance is eminently reasonable.

 

“Although we will await FDA’s guidance, I remain very skeptical about whether it is possible to reliably test premium cigars because making premium cigars is an inherently unscientific process.  Because premium cigars are handcrafted, they are subject to great natural variation.  We know that the amount of sunlight, rain, and wind affects the characteristics of premium cigar tobacco just as the size of tobacco leaves and where they are grown on a plant does as well.  As cigar makers, we harness this natural variation to create unique and interesting blends.  A recent study that tested showed how great this natural variation can be.  In it, researchers tested the same premium cigar brand in two different years and found variances upwards of 50%.

“Moreover, the cost of testing is also likely to be enormous.  A lab that proposed testing premium cigars like cigarettes recently quoted $18,000 just to test a single cigar. This huge sum works for a product like cigarettes that are mass produced but not for premium cigars that are hand rolled in small batches.  As there are tens of thousands of different premium cigars sold in the USA today, the total cost for testing them could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“We are very grateful to Cigar Rights of America, the International Premium Cigar and Pipe Retailers Association, and the Cigar Association of America for their continued leadership and efforts to seek much needed relief for the premium cigar industry.”