Your luxury guide

The Cohiba Brand

Year of foundation: 1927

Tobacco Country: Cuba

Tobacco Procedence: Vuelta Abajo

Factory: Partagas

A new brand which was introduced only in 1968, Cohiba quickly became the flagship brand of the Cuban industry. Developed initially as a medium bodied protocol puro for presentation only by officials of the Cuban government, Cohiba was marketed widely beginning in 1982.

The initial sizes were the Lancero, the Corona Especiale and the Panetela, with the Esplendido, Robusto and Exquisito added in 1989. In 1992, in salute to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the Caribbean, the Siglo series was introduced.

The Cohiba series was initially made in the El Laguito factory in Havana, but production is now also in the Fernando Perez German factory.

Soon there was a demand for higher quality product in Europe, and Spanish ones were superseded by those made in Cuba, which was then a Spanish colony, where production had started during the mid-18th century. Cigars, European smokers discovered, traveled better than tobacco. They probably arrived in North America in 1762, when Israel Putnam, later an American general in the American War of Independence (1774-1778), returned from Cuba, where he had served in the British army. He came back to his home in Connecticut, where tobacco had been grown by settlers since the 17th century, with a selection of Havana cigars and large amounts of Cuban tobacco seed. Factories were later set up in the Connecticut area, processing the tobacco grown from the Cuban seed. In the early 19th century American domestic production started to take off and Cubans also began to be imported in significant numbers. But cigar smoking did not really boom in the United States until around the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, with individual brands emerging by the late 19th century. By then the cigar had become a status symbol in the United States.

During the same period, smoking had become so popular among gentlemen in Britain and France that European trains introduced smoking cars to accommodate them, and hotels and clubs boasted smoking rooms. The after-dinner stogie, accompanied by glasses of port or brandy, also became a tradition. This ritual was given an added boost by the fact that the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII and a leader of fashion, was a devotee, much to the annoyance of his mother, Queen Victoria, who disliked smoking.

Cigarettes first appeared on the scene in the early 19th century as a cheap alternative. The introduction of cigarette-making machines, in the 1880s, accelerated the growth in popularity of this form of smoking, which had become dominant by World War I.

As a response, the production of machine-made cigars began in Cuba in the 1920s, after which both the manufacture and smoking of handmade ones fell into a slow but steady decline.

Smoking in general has, of course, become much less popular since the publication of the American Surgeon General’s report on its effects on health in the early 1960s. But since the early 1990s, there has been a major revival in the popularity of handmade product: they have become chic once more, thanks to the enthusiasm shown for them by stars, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Woods, Jack Nicholson, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore and model Linda Evangelista, demonstrating that, among the rich and famous, cigars are just as popular as ever.

We do not know when it was first grown, or smoked, but we can be pretty certain that the inhabitants of Europe were unaware of tobacco until after Columbus’s epic voyage of 1492.

Two of his sailors reported that the Cuban Indians smoked a primitive form of cigar, with twisted, dried tobacco leaves rolled in other leaves such as palm or plantain. In due course, Spanish and other European sailors caught the habit, as did the Conquistadors, and smoking spread to Spain and Portugal and eventually France, most probably through Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Portugal, who gave his name to nicotine. Later, the habit spread to Italy and, after Sir Walter Raleigh’s voyages to America, to Britain.

Smoking was familiar throughout Europe – in pipes in Britain – by the mid-16th century and, half a century later, tobacco started to be grown commercially in America. Tobacco was originally thought to have medicinal qualities, but there were already some who considered it evil and it was denounced by Philip II of Spain, and James I of England. The word cigar originated from sikar, the Mayan-Indian word for smoking, which became cigarro in Spanish, although the word itself, and variations on it, did not come into general use until the mid-18th century.

Cigars, more or less in the form that we know them today, were first made in Spain in the early 18th century, using Cuban tobacco. At that time, none were exported from Cuba.

By 1790, manufacture had spread north of the Pyrenees, with small factories being set up in France and Germany.

The Dutch, too, started making cigars using tobacco from their Far Eastern colonies. But smoking only became a widespread custom in France and Britain after the Peninsular War (1808-14), when returning British and French veterans made fashionable the habit they had learned while serving in Spain.

Production of “segars” began in Britain in 1820, and in 1821 an Act of Parliament was needed to set out regulations governing their production. Because of an import tax, foreign cigars in Britain were already regarded as a luxury item.