From Rich Perelman at CigarCyclopedia:

Sales of little cigars – sized like cigarettes, but made of tobacco and homogenized tobacco leaf – increased by 16 percent in 2004 to 2.9 billion.

At that level, Norman Sharp, President of the Cigar Association of America, indicated in a story in the Winston-Salem Journal that 2004 sales reached $160-170 million. That’s still a small part of the overall cigar sales total in the U.S.

The story focused on Lane Limited, a Tucker, Georgia-based company which is a unit of the Reynolds American tobacco conglomerate. Lane is primarily in the cigarette (Dunhill) and little cigar (Winchester) business, but is best known among cigar lovers as distributor of the Dunhill Dominican and Dunhill Signed Range brands. It was a major player in the cigar business until merged into British-American Tobacco in 1999 and went from more than a dozen brands – including Legion, Medal of Honor, Montecruz, Onyx and Royal Jamaica – to just the Dunhill business.

In the little cigar segment, Lane stands third behind Swisher International and Altadis U.S.A. According to the Maxwell Report, which follows cigarette and cigar consumption and sales statistics, Swisher has 42.7% of the market, led by its Swisher Sweets brand. Altadis has a whole portfolio of the little cigar brands, led by Dutch Treats, Hav-A-Tampa, Phillies Little Cigars, Erik, Between the Acts and others, and has a market share of 26.2%. Lane’s Winchester, Schimmelpennick and Captain Black brands own 15.5% of the market. Combined, that’s 84.4%.

Although the little cigar total reached 2.9 billion in 2004, the largest cigar segment by sales is machine-made large cigars at 4.6 billion. The premium cigar market – imported handmades – is comparatively tiny at 304 million last year, only about 3.9% of the total. But it’s the most fun.

From Rich Perelman at CigarCyclopedia:

You know the names of today’s great brands. Davidoff, Montecristo, Macanudo, Partagas, Arturo Fuente, Padron and so on.

One hundred years ago, Henry Clay would have been one of the first names on the list. Maybe it will be again!?

Named for one of America’s great politicians and statesmen of the early to mid-1800s, the brand reportedly developed out of Clay’s ownership of a tobacco plantation in Cuba. After serving as Senator from Kentucky in 1806-07 and from 1810-11, he was so admired that upon his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1811, he was immediately elected by his colleagues to be Speaker of the House!

He served off and on as Senator and Representative from Kentucky from 1806 to 1852 and was U.S. Secretary of State from 1825-29. He ran for President three times, but was defeated by John Quincy Adams in 1824, Andrew Jackson in 1832 and by James K. Polk in 1844. When he died in 1852, he was the first to be given the honor of lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol.

When the Cuban tobacco industry was aggressively aggregated by large corporations at the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th Century, Henry Clay was one of the leading brands in the world, owned by the Tabacalera Cubana, which focused on the American market.

In 1904, the Henry Clay line included six shapes – all perfectos – which retailed from 15 cents (the 4 3/8-inch by 52-ring Cadet) up to 50 cents for the 6 5/8-inch by 56-ring Secretary of the Navy!

In recent years, Henry Clay has been a modestly-priced Dominican-made cigar with a rustic feel and Connecticut-grown maduro wrappers. It was offered for years in just three shapes with the cigars banded together uncellophaned inside the box to create some unevenness in the shape of some of the cigars. It had some devoted followers, but not enough to make the brand important.

Additional versions of the Henry Clay line were introduced, with Habana 2000 wrappers and more conventional packing, but they also failed to make much of an impression on the market.

Now, a new blend of the venerable Henry Clay brand is available, this time produced in Honduras at Altadis’ Flor de Copan factory, already well known for the new, powerful Saint Luis Rey and Maria Guerrero brands.

This version features a Nicaraguan-grown wrapper and binder and a combination of filler leaves from Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru, offered in boxes of 20 by J-R Cigars.

The taste is reported to be rich with a taste of spice and a soft, slightly sweet finish. It’s also priced well, at $44.95 to $59.95 per box. There’s a choice of five sizes, from the robusto-sized Dalia (5 x 50) to the double corona-sized Churchill (7 x 52).

Very near to the end of his life, Clay became a national hero once again by putting together the Compromise of 1850, which helped to stave off the Civil War for a decade. Maybe this new life can make him a hero to cigar smokers in a new century!

From Rich Perelman at CigarCyclopedia:

After the superheated end to a 2004 which saw imports of premium cigars surpass 300 million, imports cooled in January 2005.

Figures reported by the Cigar Association of America showed that January imports of premium cigars from the 10 major exporting countries dropped by 15.2% from 11.34 million sticks in 2004 to 9.62 million. It’s a small decrease, almost all of it from the Dominican Republic, where imports dropped by more than 38% year-over-year.

The CAA also noted that premium cigar imports for all of 2004 were revised to 304,535,000 after all machine-made cigars from the Dominican Republic were accounted for. It’s still the largest import total since the last year of the Cigar Boom in 1998.

From Rich Perelman at CigarCyclopedia:

How do new brands start? What makes someone want to bring a new brand to market in the face of more than 1,000 already there?

Flor de Jardin made its first commercial splash at last week’s National Association of Tobacco Outlets (NATO) exposition in Las Vegas. Owner Michael Makens was busy at the booth, welcoming buyers and handing out samples of his new line.

It’s only the beginning of the business, but it was also the culmination of three years of work since Makens fell head over heels for a cigar he tried at a tiny factory in Danli, Honduras. “Everything about that first experience was amazing. It was and still is the best cigar I have ever smoked.”

(more…)