Aged Habanos. Time to Rest

THE AGING OF ROLLED HABANOS IS JUST A MUCH SUBTLER AND SLOWER TUNING THAT, AS LONG AS THE CIGARS HAVE BEEN PROPERLY PRESERVED, ALSO BRINGS ABOUT CHANGES IN THE WAY THEY ARE SMOKED, SOMETHING HIGHLY COVETED AMONG SOME CONSUMERS

The tradition of aging already-rolled cigarettes, cigars or stogies started with consumers or collectors who were stashing cigars in good conditions as far as preservation and temperature are concerned, just waiting for them to evolve as time ticked by, or just with specialized retailers who were piling up on good amounts of Habanos in their stores and were later on putting them on sale as even more refined products.

There's no doubt that the United Kingdom market helped like no other to turn this practice into a trendsetter. The two most important British auction houses –Christie's and Sotheby's- have been putting “vintage” tobacco under the gavel for a number of years, either by selling “old” cigars that had been rolled before the triumph of the 1959 Cuban revolution or auctioning off Habanos from tobacco brands that shut down their factories on the island nation.

In addition to boosting up the collector's mindset, the launch of limited outputs of one-shot editions, such as the Millennium Jars rolled out by Habanos S.A. to commemorate the coming of the new millennium, or the birth of the Limited Editions in the year 2000, also encouraged the new tradition of letting certain cigars rest for the sake of just collecting them and then puffing on them later, in a bid to observe the organoleptic evolution of rolled cigars.