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CIGARS POSSESS two primary characteristics that make up their overall taste, or flavor profile: blend (flavor notes) and body. Some separate body and strength; I don’t. It’s a masturbatory semantic exercise. Body and strength are different, but largely the same. Leave it at that.

BLEND: Tasting notes are simply the descriptive terms assigned to flavors generated by the tobaccos in the cigar’s blend—the coalescence of tastes of the wrapper, binder and filler when smoked together in a single rolled cigar.

Cigar magazines, websites and books assign numerous descriptive words and terms to convey a cigar’s flavor notes: nutty, fruity, peppery. spicy, hint of cacao, trace of espresso, earthy, woody, floral, grassy, leathery—the terms go on and on.

Premium and ultra-premium hand-rolled long-filler (totalmente a mano tripa larga) cigars do not achieve these tastes from having been infused with artificial flavors. They’re organic flavors found in the tobacco itself courtesy of the terroir (a combination of soil type, elevation, weather patterns and human factors); the varietal (or type) of tobacco; curing and fermenting time and techniques—all have tremendous impact on the flavor of the tobacco. Can a cigar truly have a hint of cacao? Yes. Does it taste like biting into a Tootsie Roll? No.

Terroir is so significant that many distinguish the difference between a puro and a multi-origin blend. (Puro is a Spanish word that has a double meaning; directly translated to English it means “pure,” but in cigar parlance it means a cigar rolled in a country of origin exclusively from home-grown tobaccos. Meaning the filler tobaccos, the binder and the wrapper leaves are all grown in a single country.) Multi-origin blends, by contrast, are what the name indicates: You might have, say, an Ecuadorian wrapper with Dominican and Nicaraguan fillers with a Mexican binder.

Combined, these elements create the overarching flavor profile.

Tasting cigars is akin to tasting Cognac, coffee and the like: The adjectives used to describe the resulting sensory sensations are simply a guide that will help others determine if a cigar will appeal to them and their favored flavor profile. Your personal preferred profile is determined by your palate. All mammals, man included, taste numerous compounds, yet the sensory palate consists of only five (not four) basic tastes: bitter, salty, sour, sweet and umami (the taste of monosodium glutamate).

Contrary to popular belief, these basic tastes and the resulting labyrinth of flavor compounds and the notes they yield are not detected by specific regions on the tongue. This misconception stems from what’s often referred to as the “tongue map,” based on a German paper written in 1901 and later mistranslated by Edwin Boring, a Harvard psychologist. This “map” purportedly shows that the back of one’s tongue registers “bitter,” the rear left and right sides “sour,” the front left and right sides “salty” and the front region “sweet.”

Some areas of the tongue are indeed more sensitive than others, but those supposedly segregated taste regions are in fact distributed fairly evenly over the tongue’s surface.

BODY & STRENGTH: Body is the other primary component of the overall flavor profile, and it falls into three basic categories: mild, medium and full-bodied. Much of a cigar’s body is derived from the combination of tobacco primings: Ligero, Viso, Seco and Volado. E.g. More Ligero means fuller-bodied; less means less. And so on. That’s overly simplified, nonetheless true.

A novice smoker may require some time to determine which cigars’ strength best suits their personal comfort zone. Think of body the same way you think about the alcohol content of wine: Some wines are as low as 5.5 percent alcohol by volume; others are as high as 15.5 or 16 percent; and fortified wines such as port (Vinho do Porto) and madeira are even higher with ABV topping 22 percent.

Strength is the nicotine content of a cigar. It’s a standalone element of body, but the two are inextricably connected. You can’t have one without the other. That’s why I don’t separate them—though again, many do. I just think it’s splitting hairs.

TASTING: A seasoned cigar enthusiast will judge his cigar by evaluating a number of criteria in addition to blend and body: construction, aesthetic and condition of the wrapper (smooth, veiny and oily, matte, toothy), draw, how the cigar lights, aroma, ash and aftertaste.

Ultimately, however, there is one undeniable truth: The difference between a “good” cigar and a “bad” cigar is something only you can determine—it’s an entirely subjective observation.

TO THIS POINT: Keep in mind that ratings and reviews in magazines, videos and blogs are, like the descriptive terms above, merely guides. Opinions are like assholes—everyone has one. And if the rater or reviewer’s tastes don’t align with your own, the rating or review, from your standpoint, is meaningless.

The singular exception to this rule is the cigar’s construction; it is either well-made and has a perfect draw or it does not. There is no subjectivity to construction—it is completely objective.

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THE NUMBER ONE query I receive via social media is: Which is the best cigar? I always respond emphatically: There is no such thing. There are, rather, only special cigar moments fostered in large part by extraordinarily crafted cigars (though not even always by them).

Keep in mind something I’ve written previously: “Taste-wise, one man’s hand-rolled tripa larga Cuban or Dominican might be another’s Dutch or German machine-made.” So while there is no best per se, there are wonderfully consistent cigars. And if you regularly partake of cigars, once you find a favorite (or two), they’ll be your personal best—or at least your preferred go-to.

The very word best denotes subjectivity, and as such must be predicated on arbitrary personal taste and preference (either by an individual or a committee of the like-minded). Yet this in no way contradicts the indisputable fact that some cigars are simply better than others—sublime ones rolled with significantly aged tobaccos, say, or from remarkable terroirs. Such premium and ultra-premium puros (or multi-origin blend cigars) are—with as little bias as I can muster here—archetypes of the craft, exemplars of the art and technique of cigarmaking. But there will never be a single one that towers over all the rest.

The art of the cigar is multifaceted. Topping the list of variables that makes one cigar more extraordinary than another is continuity of flavor profile—the cigarmaker’s ability to perceptively replicate the blend and smoking experience year after year, decade upon decade, regardless of good harvests or bad, high tobacco yields or low and much else besides.

The second key component is consistency of quality construction. Blend continuity and production quality are objective, while a smoker’s particular flavor-profile preference is individually dependent and thus subjective.

A quarter-century ago, for an intimate Millennium New Year’s Eve fête we were hosting, a good friend of mine—a fellow cigar devotee—together purchased a mostly intact (21 of 25 cigars) box of 1961 Montecristo Number 1s. The box came with impeccable provenance, with a Canadian cigar revenue tax stamp with the year rubber-stamped atop the paper label.

The day before the party temptation got the best of me—Y2K anxiety was in the febrile air, and the world might be ending in 36 hours, after all—and I lit one up. I had smoked many Monte 1s throughout the ’90s and was quite familiar with the classic blend in that format/vitola.

What was most striking was that going on four decades later, the ’61 was utterly evocative of then-contemporary versions despite the fact that the wrappers were not the same. (When the last leaf was picked during the 1996-97 tobacco harvest, an era ended. Corojo—the “World’s Best Wrapper,” which had sheathed Havanas since the 1930s—ceased being cultivated by Cubatabaco growers—los tabacaleros de Cuba—due to its blue mold susceptibility. It was replaced by hybrids.)

This empirical observation would likely not hold true in today’s context… In post-pandemic Cuba the ‘classic Cuban blends’ have been forsaken and replaced by a more uniform/homogeneous blend approach for the standard production (vitolario) offerings.

Nonetheless, the December 30, 1999, cigar, and the one I smoked the following evening (to celebrate the fact that airplanes were in fact staying aloft, computer systems weren’t crashing, among other things) became exceedingly noteworthy cigar memories. For me, anyway. Yet I’d be remiss to call either millennium Monte the best. After all, the best cigar is typically the one currently in your hand.

Likewise, the most memorable tend to be those enjoyed during a shared experience or an awe-inspiring moment in one’s life. The vintage Dunhill Havana Club I smoked outside the hospital the day my daughter was born—like the party-like-it’s-1999 Monte—are two such cigars for me. Best is in the eye of the beholder, and indelible memories can crop up when you most, or least, expect them.

Sylvester Stallone, Edward Sahakian, and the author at Davidoff London

BY PEOPLE, I mean famous people—historic figures, cultural icons, silver-screen legends—not mere mortals such as you and I.

Though I’ve lived in New York City longer than anywhere else, I was born and raised in Los Angeles. L.A., especially then, was steeped in Tinseltown. Celebrity culture wasn’t an abstraction; it was ambient. And cigar culture—specifically, celebrity cigar culture—entered my life curiously early.

My father owned a succession of Jaguars—mostly V12s—all in various shades of blue or black. Some of our drives together were routine: dropping me at my grandparents’ bungalow in Studio City. Others took us “over the hill” to Alfred Dunhill in Beverly Hills. His first Jag, a 1976 Wedgwood-blue Series II XJ12, would purr over Coldwater Canyon or Laurel Canyon. On hot days, my legs stuck to the Connolly Vaumol leather seats, while the walnut trim and Wilton wool carpets seemed oddly impervious to the Southern California sun. He’d turn on the radio—classic rock—and light a cigar, typically a Dunhill Montecruz, though a Jamaican-rolled Macanudo Vintage Cabinet Selection No. 1 found its way into his cigar rotation too. He wasn’t brand-loyal. Anything “good” would do.

At Dunhill, the humidor manager knew my father by name. I was simply “young man.” I remember the leather chairs, pipe tobacco in tall apothecary jars, the famed Humidor Room of course, the intoxicating mélange (think Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille) and the walls lined with framed, autographed black-and-white photographs. I didn’t know who the men in the photos were. My father waved them off as “old stars.” Later I learned otherwise: Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, Groucho Marx, George Peppard—a rogues’ gallery of cinematic cigar devotees.

The original Dunhill Beverly Hills outpost, a 1951 midcentury architectural jewel box at 136 South Rodeo Drive, stood near Romanoff’s, the legendary Classic Hollywood haute continental cuisine haunt. By the early ’60s, Romanoff’s—and many of its stars—were gone, though the stogie stalwarts remained at Dunhill. Over the years, Dunhill’s clientele included all of the above, as well as Frank Sinatra and Golden Age of Television stars Milton “Uncle Miltie” Berle—with whom I had cigars more than once; it was an experience—and George Burns (lighters and humidors only; he famously favored El Producto Queens).

Years later, in graduate school and just after, I managed the West Coast Davidoff flagship, also in Beverly Hills, tucked along Via Rodeo—a block-long fantasy of Paris as imagined by Hollywood. Davidoff drew a different New Hollywood and Blockbuster Era cast: Johnny Depp, Pierce Brosnan, Tom Selleck, Whoopi Goldberg, Gregory Hines, Joe Pesci, the perpetually elegant Michael Nouri. Stallone and Schwarzenegger held court up the street at Nazareth’s Fine Cigars; Mel Gibson preferred the Grand Havana Room. So, when I say people, this is who I mean.

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YUL BRYNNER’S DON CÁNDIDOS

I HAVE NEVER been especially drawn to celebrity for celebrity’s sake. When you shake hands with John Wayne at the ripe old age of 11—his hand was seemingly the size a baseball mitt—it rather ruins the novelty. I mean, it was the fucking Duke.

Later, while still single and living in L.A. before moving to the right coast for good, I flirted (unsuccessfully) with a few A- and B-list actresses and dated the occasional D-list starlet. Suffice it to say that, in my admittedly limited sample, narcissism with a dash of plain old batshit crazy was not in short supply. I attended more than a few premieres and Hollywood parties. At one rooftop gathering in Westwood, I watched actor and comedian Chris Farley—so spectacularly out of his mind that I couldn’t begin to imagine what he had taken—face-plant through a table. Now, as to whether the pratfall was part shtick and part inebriation or it was all intoxication I haven’t a clue, but it hurt in the following morning regardless. Truthfully, it was equal parts horrifying and tragic. Life in the fast lane. RIP.

Over the years I’ve shared cocktails and cigars with my fair share of actors. Kurt Russell is every bit as likeable as you’d hope. Pierce Brosnan is a genuine gentleman—a mensch, really. Chris Noth was always gracious to me and, in my opinion, received an unfair public flogging. As for smoking a joint with James Coburn . . . that remains one of my life’s greatest experiences. Quite simply, he was the coolest man in any room he entered.

I mention none of this to impress. Quite the opposite. It is merely context. When you grow up in a company town, and that company is Hollywood, celebrity becomes oddly ordinary. Perhaps that explains why I have always been more interested in objects than people. I dabble in Hollywood memorabilia, though almost exclusively where it intersects with cigars.

One of my greatest collecting regrets was missing the opportunity to acquire Walt Disney’s personal humidor, which eventually found its way into Disneyland’s exclusive Club 33. Years later, when cigar smoking at the club came to an end, the humidor quietly surfaced in a private sale, I simply couldn’t afford it at the time. C’est la vie.

There have been happier acquisitions. A handful of Jamaican-made Nat Sherman No. 11 cigars from Sylvester Stallone’s personal collection. The historic bespoke Santa Maria Havana (Julieta No. 2), housed in a personalized aluminum tube inscribed the right honourable winston churchill, which Winnie himself presented to the megalomaniacal The Ten Commandments (1956) auteur Cecil B. DeMille—a remarkable piece I picked up at auction and discussed at length in The Impossible Collection of Cigars.

Then there are three complete boxes of Yul Brynner’s Dunhill Don Cándido Dunhill Selección Suprema No. 500—a grand corona (6½ in x 48 rg) vitola—which even after smoking my share of I have never written about.

Until now.

When I managed the Davidoff Beverly Hills flagship, certain high-profile clients occasionally requested cigars we simply did not stock. Nor were they stocked in the United States. Naturally, we did our best to accommodate them. Discreetly. You have to give the people what they want.

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IN MANY WAYS, my book CIGARS: A Biography—excerpted below—could be viewed as three books in one. Given its scale, that is perhaps unsurprising. The limited first edition, published in May 2025, comprised 416 pages and sold out by December; the slightly expanded standard edition (still avalable), released that October, grew to 424 pages.

More importantly,…

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“Here’s an easy way to figure out if you’re in a cult: If you’re wondering whether you’re in a cult, the answer is yes.” —Stephen Colbert

I LIKE PINOT NOIR. A lot. I like the aromas, the body and the general absence of aggressive tannins. I’m fond of the French—Burgundy, obviously—but I also enjoy Pinot Noirs from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, as well as the Sonoma Coast and Santa Barbara wine regions of California. Central Otago (New Zealand) Pinots and I are still in negotiations—but relations are improving.

I also like Cuban puros. Not all of them, mind you, but some. And far fewer than in years past, if we’re being honest about it all, which we are, or at least I am. I also like cigars from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras, which tend to be more reliable companions these days—like a friend who actually turns up when he says they will.

I mention Burgundy and Havanas advisedly—two names that, quite apart from their intrinsic merits, have inspired a level of devotion bordering on the fanatical, a cultlike reverence that tends to abandon common sense at the door and replace it with misty-eyed certainty—it’s all very earnest, and not without charm. Still, neither is a club I’ve ever felt compelled to join largely because I prefer my pleasures grounded in reality rather than ritual or nostalgia—I’ve never been drawn to that sort of fervor. In other words, never drank the Kool-Aid so to speak. I’ve long subscribed to the notion that: One should drink and smoke what is genuinely good, not merely what one is told is supposed to be. Allow me to explain…

The way I’ve come to understand things like these is that there are those who see the world myopically: They think all wines should come from France, and all cigars should come from Cuba. And that’s fine, I suppose. But that’s not for me. I see the world with a child’s sense of wonder. As a youngling might view an expansive ice cream parlor, with its endless array of treats, I too want to try it all. I’ll have favorites, of course, as we all do, but my mind is always open. In part, mine is a view rooted in optimism about the new, rather than the fear of the unknown.

While I fully appreciate why Grand Cru Burgundy enjoys its near-mythic status as a consumable luxury—though there are any number of New World Pinot Noirs that perform with equal poise and rather less ceremony—I’ve never entirely subscribed to the cult of Cuban cigars.

This may raise an eyebrow or two, particularly coming from someone so thoroughly entangled in the subject of cigars. Good. It should. Orthodoxy benefits from the occasional disturbance.

To be clear, I like some Havanas perfectly well. More than that, I’ve praised dark Cuban tobaccos and finished Havana cigars—publicly, and in places where such praise tends to echo (Time, Worth, Robb Report, Elite Traveler, Bloomberg and so on). I’ve long extolled tobaccos from the Cuban Protected Denominations of Origin (DOP) vegas finas de primera growing regions—the island’s equivalent of French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) grand cru terroirs. I’ve also said that Cuban cigars (again, some, certainly not all) can be exceptional, particularly with five to seven years of age, when time has done what time does best: round out the edges and restore a sense of composure.

And yet, admiration is not allegiance.

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It began life as a serialized feature for Cigar Journal. Ultimately, the magazine declined to publish it, concluding that it was simply too long for the confines of a quarterly publication. A perfectly understandable editorial decision, if one is in the business of counting pages rather than turning them.

Undeterred, I moved on.

A substantially revised version eventually became part of the “CIGARS: a saga” chapter of CIGARS: a biography. Yet even then, the story did not feel complete. Time has a way of enriching certain narratives; fresh perspectives emerge, overlooked details assume new significance, and broader patterns gradually come into focus. What follows is the latest—and, I rather suspect, not the last—iteration.

Certain stories resist a single telling. They deserve to be revisited because history has an unfortunate habit of compressing decades into tidy anecdotes while reducing complex chains of events to convenient myths. This is one of those tales.

The Cigar Boom of the 1990s has suffered precisely that fate. This is one of its defining stories, alongside the launch of Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1992, the introduction of the first commercial Dominican puro, the Fuente Fuente OpusX in 1995 (a story I’ve recounted in two book: ARTURO FUENTE From Dream to Dynasty, and, as a condensed chapter in CIGARS: a biography.), and the founding of La Flor Dominicana the following year. Each has become part of modern cigar lore. Yet, like all enduring legends, each is rather more nuanced than popular memory suggests.

I count myself unusually fortunate. I did not merely witness the Cigar Boom—I enjoyed a front-row seat. Immersed in the premium cigar industry throughout those extraordinary years, first as one of the managers of Davidoff Beverly Hills flagship with its extraordinary celebrity clientele and later as the founding editor of SMOKE magazine, I experienced the period not as mythology, but simply as everyday life. At the time, none of us imagined we were living through what would become one of the defining chapters in the modern history of premium cigars. We were simply too busy doing the work.

Three decades later, what fascinates me is not only the Boom itself, though it was a marvelous time, but the invisible architecture beneath it: the people, the decisions, the calculated risks, and the remarkable foresight that made such an extraordinary moment possible. The origins of the Boom lie years before the headlines—in quiet acts of conviction, thoughtful stewardship, and an unwavering belief that premium cigars deserved recognition alongside the world’s great luxury goods and enduring epicurean traditions.

Few individuals deserve greater credit for laying that foundation than Dr. Ernst Schneider and Zino Davidoff. Their names have become legendary, yet their greatest achievement was not simply building a remarkable business. Together, they transformed the way premium cigars were perceived.

The American cigar market that exploded during the 1990s did not appear overnight; it had been patiently cultivated for years. The Boom was merely the visible crescendo. The more compelling story is what happened long before the applause began. -SIG

DR. ERNST SCHNEIDER AND ZINO DAVIDOFF (above) were not merely successful men, individually or collectively; they were the sort of formidable visionaries who tend either to reshape industries or crash spectacularly in the attempt. And while the most brilliant partnerships rarely guarantee lasting harmony or enduring alignment—even when reinforced by disciplined Swiss strategy, relentless ambition, and a shared disdain for mediocrity—it nonetheless remains an exceptionally promising place to begin. The conceptual axiom that convention is often tantamount to inertia, while iconoclastic innovation yields momentum, is relevant here. The key remains whether that momentum will carry forward or backward—something only time will tell.

In the late 1960s and throughout 1980 the Davidoff [White Label] brand flourished, particularly in airport duty free, and select European capitals—Geneva of course, but London and Paris too. (1980 saw the back-to-back openings of Davidoff London on May 29 and Boutique 22—intended as Davidoff Paris—on June 12, a pace of expansion that suggested neither hesitation nor modest ambition. (Zino attended both inaugural fêtes—an appearance that, in fairness, suggested a man both deeply committed to expansion and admirably unwilling to miss a proper celebration.) Still, while its reputation spread throughout the Continent it was far lesser known in the United States, except a privileged set of jet set cigar connoisseurs.

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THERE ARE all manner of books about men’s manners. How to Be a Man: A Guide to Style and Behavior for the Modern Gentleman by the inestimable Glenn O’Brien (2011) is a classic; Peter Post’s Essential Manners for Men (2003) and Men and Style: Essays, Advice and Considerations (2016) by David Coggins are excellent as well.

Learning etiquette from a book and living it are different things, though. Nothing beats practical experience, and assuming your mama raised you right, some decorum is intuitive. Others, more along the lines of customs, must be taught. Anyone who knows me knows one custom I espouse is that a gentleman should always carry a “three-finger” cigar case: a cigar for oneself, one to give away and one to trade. Sensible, polite …but not necessarily intuitive.

Cigars are highly ceremonial, and as such traditions and social graces are prevalent throughout cigar culture. Here are some tips to keep you on the right side of the behavioral spectrum. (Failure to adhere to these is a major personal pet peeve.)

ASK BEFORE YOU IGNITE. Unless you’re in a smoking establishment (lounge, club, bar, merchant tasting room, etc.), always ask those around you if they mind if you light up. This goes double if women are present. I don’t care how old-fashioned that sounds. Chivalry and manners maketh the man.

NO SPITTING, NO CLIPPING. Do not place your cigar in your mouth in any way—no moistening, licking, chewing, drooling or “just seeing how it feels”—prior to cutting . . . and then have the audacity to ask to borrow someone’s cutter. This isn’t cigar etiquette; it’s a public-health directive. It happens a lot more than you might expect. (It’s up there with asking to try “just a puff” of someone’s cigar. Did we learn nothing from the pandemic other than how to forget boundaries more quickly?)

PAIR IT, DON’T DIP IT. No matter what you’ve seen in movies, reels, and on videos, and no matter if your friend swears it “elevates the experience,” for the love of all that is civilized, do not dip the cap end of your cigar into fine Cognac, brandy or other eau-de-vie. That’s not refinement. It’s marinating.

STIFLE THE BRAGS, HUMBLE OR OTHERWISE. No one cares how many aged Cubans you have. Unless someone asks specifically, zip it.

REMEMBER THE WIMP. Popeye’s burger-loving pal, J. Wellington Wimpy, was a polite moocher. Be polite. Don’t be a mooch. If you’re headed to a social occasion, cigar lounge, barbecue or even a casual stroll and you know cigars will be in rotation, come equipped. A cigar is not something you “borrow”—there is no polite way to ask. If you’re unsure whether the host will provide, assume he won’t, and bring your own. Preparedness, too, is an element of the gentleman’s code.

THE HOST WITH THE MOST: If you are the host, generosity is mandatory. Have enough cigars on hand for everyone to enjoy at least one. If it’s a round of golf or any extended affair, plan on two each. Running out isn’t just inconvenient. It’s amateurish.

If the social occasion is at your home, office or club, it is essential that you’ve set the table or bar top properly. The host must have lighters (or long matches) and cutters readily available—on the bar, on a tray, within easy reach. Scatter some ashtrays about as well. You wouldn’t host dinner and forget the forks and knives, would you? This is the same deal, just with puros instead of porterhouses.

GOOD TO THE LAST PUFF—OR NOT: I was once asked, “If you’ve been given a cigar, is it rude not to finish it?” My answer was, more or less: “it depends entirely on how much inner Larry David you’re prepared to indulge.”

Seriously though, barring truly extenuating circumstances—an egregiously unpleasant flavor, a plugged draw, or a cigar that insists on canoeing like it’s navigating the Hudson—basic civility applies. If you accepted it willingly, the polite course is to see it through to at least the final third. Anything less begins to feel less like discernment and more like a social statement.

FROM TALL TALES TO TALL TIPPLES. It could be easily said, and decidedly has been by many, that Ernest “Papa” Hemingway was as well known for his writing as much as his imbibing. And like fellow literary lion Ian Fleming of 007 fame, Hemingway often wrote original cocktail recipes into his pros (see number two and five on this list).

So renowned for his Lost Generation Parisian moveable feast meanderings and carousing that the saloon at Hôtel Ritz Paris is aptly named the Hemingway Bar, which the author-hunter-fisherman claimed to have “liberated” from the Germans.

The Ritz Hotel bar rescue by the Hemingway on August 25, 1944—the very day the Nazis occupiers surrendered the French Capital—is the stuff of legend. So the story goes, Hemingway, backed by a group of Resistance fighters, burst into the hotel and announced that he had come to personally liberate it and its bar, which had been requisitioned by the Nazis in June 1940. Upon entering the fabled establishment Papa was informed by the hotel’s managing director Claude Auzello that the Germans had fled well before his arrival. Hemingway nonetheless remained, and is said he ran up a tab for 51 dry Martinis—one presumes for himself, as well as his men.

To learn the entirely of Hemingway’s drinking habits and related anecdotes I highly recommend Philip Greene’s To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion.

Greene notes in his book, that Hemingway “thought globally… drank locally,” which given the regular haunts he frequented in his various habitual ports of call—El Floridita in Havana, Harry’s Bar in Venice, Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, Florida— that makes good sound sense. (I’ve had the good fortune to imbibe at all three, even if Floridita and Joes are long in the tooth tourist traps.) To make do until you pick-up Greene’s volume, here are five of Hemingway’s favored inebriants.

Lastly, Papa wasn’t much of cigar partaker (there’s only one known image of him lighting-up, in it he looks less than thrilled; he did periodically puff on a pipe), which might explain as to why none of these pair particularly well with a puro, other than his preferred martini preparation—a cigar and a martini, as classic as it gets, much like Hemingway’s literary and libation oeuvre.

Hemingway Special Daiquiri (a.k.a. Papa Doble; Hemingway Special)

- 2 ounces white rum
- ½ fl. oz. maraschino liqueur
- ¾ fl. oz. lime juice, freshly squeezed
- ½ fl. oz. grapefruit juice, freshly squeezed
- ½ fl. oz. simple syrup (optional)
- Garnish: lime wheel

Created by Constantino Ribalaigua Vert the legendary bartender at El Floridita. Hemingway did not opt for the added sugar, but most do as it’s rather tart without.

Hemingway Champagne (aka Death in the Afternoon)

- 1 ½ fl. oz. (1 jigger) absinthe
- 4 ½ fl. oz. chilled Champagne
- ½ fl. oz. simple syrup (optional; Hemingway opted out of the added sugar)

Published in 1932, the non-fiction novel Death in the Afternoon offers in rather exacting detail the recipe for this now classic cocktail. It reads: “Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.”

Bellini

- 2 fl. oz. white peach puree
- 6 fl. oz. chilled Prosecco

Created in 1948 at the historic Harry’s Bar in Venice (by Giuseppe Cipriani who opened his barroom doors in 17 years prior), this sweet and viscos concoction was Hemingway’s cocktail of choice when in the Bride of the Sea. Now served at all Cipriani establishments worldwide; and sold by the bottle in gourmet markets.

Hemingway Martini (which is really a Gibson)

- 1 ¾ fl. oz. London dry gin (Hemingway liked Gordon’s; I am a bigger fan of Sipsmith)
- 1 teaspoon dry vermouth
- Cocktail onion, frozen
- Served in frozen martini glass or coupe

Everyone likes their martini prepared just slightly so. And while its said Hemingway liked vermouth, he didn’t care for it in his martinis, which one could only call, “extra-dry” with a teaspoon, barely enough for a rinse, of the botanical infused fortified wine. The onion makes it a Gibson instead of a martini, which should only be garnished with olives or my preference, lemon peel or twist.

Green Isaac’s Special

- 2 fl. oz. London dry gin
- 4 fl. oz. unsweetened coconut water (not milk)
- 1 fl. oz. lime juice, freshly squeezed
- 2 to 4 dashes Angostura bitters
- Garnish: Lime wedge

The Green Isaac’s Special cocktail first appears in Papa’s first posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream, he wrote: “Where Thomas Hudson lay on the mattress his head was in the shade cast by the platform at the forward end of the flying bridge where the controls were and when Eddy came aft with the tall cold drink made of gin, lime juice, green coconut water and chipped ice with just enough Angostura bitters to give it a rusty, rose color, he held the drink in the shadow so the ice would not melt while he looked out over the sea.”

Bar Hemingway, The Ritz, Paris

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I HAVE LONG ENTERTAINED—perhaps unwisely—the idea of launching a third cigar lifestyle magazine. This, after two instructive misadventures involving the first pair I founded: SMOKE (founded 1994) and The Cigar Report (est. 2007), both of which now reside in that peculiar limbo reserved for ventures lost to double-dealing partners and the procedural charms of bankruptcy court. One learns. One carries on. One considers doing it all over again.

The impulse, in truth, stems far less from nostalgia than irritation—specifically, at the conspicuous absence of proper, long-form journalism. Within the cigar world, such depth survives principally in Cigar Aficionado, and to a more modest extent in Cigar Journal. Elsewhere, the landscape has become rather more… immediate. Digital outlets proliferate, video series multiply (a few of which, somewhat questionably, I occasionally appear on as a guest), and one quietly wonders whether launching another print magazine at this juncture would constitute conviction—or merely admirable stubbornness dressed as optimism.

Friends—thoughtful, well-meaning, occasionally insistent—have suggested two alternatives: an original video series of my own or a migration to Substack. I resisted both for years:

Video, because I became a writer precisely to avoid the obligation of appearing on camera (despite the aforementioned periodic lapses in documentaries and other people’s vlogs).

Substack, because… well, one can only invent so many reasons not to do something before they begin to sound suspiciously like excuses. As the platform filled with serious journalists and novelists, my resistance became less principled and more performative. So here we are.

What you’ll find is, unapologetically, long-form writing—though not, I trust, punishingly so. Those who found CIGARS: A Biography a touch expansive may be reassured: these pieces are designed to be substantial, not exhaustive; digestible, not daunting.

Nor will the subject matter be confined exclusively to cigars. Watches, spirits and historic cocktails, travel, and other well-earned distractions will make their appearances. The through-line is interest—genuine, occasionally obsessive interest—wherever it happens to land. Expect properly considered features, with the occasional Substack Notes woven in for good measure.

In short: less a magazine reborn than a continuation by other means—adapted, perhaps, but not entirely reformed. -SIG