Today is Independence Day in the United States, and as part of a commemoration of that holiday I am doing a week-long series of the top ten “Made in the USA” cigars. The series continues today as we look at two cigars made outside of Florida.

One line is made in a city that in symbolizes in many way an America of times gone past. It has a unique culture produced by a unique coming-together of people from many countries and many different ethnic groups. It has produced a unique cigar.

The other is made in a city that has no past. Or at least, not a past that stretches back very far. Calling the culture of this second U.S. city “unique” really would not do justice to it.

But enough preamble. Today’s entries in these reviews of the best premium cigars made in the United States start below the fold.

The order in which cigars are presented in this series does not indicate relative quality or rating. It is not a top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top list. All cigars in this list are quite good, all are quite different, and each one is a #1 cigar in its own way.

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From Karin Goodwin at The Sunday Times, Scotland:

He may have saved the country from Nazi occupation but even Winston Churchill is not exempt from the tentacles of political correctness.

Because of the ban on smoking in public places, Britain’s greatest wartime prime minister will be without his trademark cigar when he is portrayed on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe festival later this year.

Mel Smith, the comedian and actor who will play him in a production of Allegiance, a play about a little-known meeting between Churchill and Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary, could be forced to use a plastic replacement.

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From Peter Vincent at the Sydney Morning Herald:

In an era where cigarette smoking is in decline for its health effects and faces increasing social censure, there has been quiet growth in the popularity of the cigar.

The theory goes that cigars are about more than just smoking. Sure, aficionados will praise the complex taste of the world’s best cigars, which are made around the Caribbean. But it’s also about how and where you smoke them.

“For me, a cigar is not an everyday thing, it’s something I spoil myself with,” says Spiro Ellul, a Melbourne collector and cigar smoker.

“I spend up to two hours smoking one, with a nice glass of red or a port and I’ll drift off and reflect on my daily life and organise my thoughts.”

Ellul spent about $15,000 last year collecting cigars. He has about 50 boxes in storage. True aficionados leave cigars to age for at least a year in a controlled humidity of between 65 and 75 per cent.

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From Rich Perelman at CigarCyclopedia:

There are many iconic cigar brands, but few cigar people who have risen to become synonymous with their brands and the traits they embody.

Zino Davidoff was such a man.

Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1906, he would have been 100 on March 11 and the company which bears his name is rolling out a bash he would have been proud of:

• A birthday dinner will be held in Geneva, where Davidoff held court at his store at One Rue de Rive, following in the tradition of his father, Henri, who opened the first Davidoff store in 1911.

• On Monday, March 13, a special anniversary cigar will be delivered to Davidoff appointed merchants. This “Diadema Fina” is a full-bodied, 6 1/2-inch-long perfecto, to be offered in boxes of 10 at about $22 apiece (before local tobacco taxes). Of course, it’s made at the Davidoff facility in Santiago, Dominican Republic.

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From Martin Fricker at The Mirror comes this piece on an upcoming auction of JFK memorabilia–including a couple of humidors still containing the cigars favored by President Kennedy:

This is history under the hammer… a bidding war for some of the most astonishing American memorabilia that has ever come on to the market.

Thousands of items that once belonged to John F Kennedy are up for grabs, many of them on internet auction site eBay.

But the glory pieces will be auctioned off in New York - including the watch he wore during his 1961 presidential inauguration and the flags that flew on his limousine when he was assassinated.

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From Matthew Temple, Financial Times:

A mansion on Sands Point, Long Island, is an unlikely setting for social rebellion. But while the rest of New York State was stubbed out with smoking bans, that was where interior designer Jamie Gibbs created his first smoking room.

With dark English walnut wall panels, oriental rugs and bookcases fronted with brass grilles, it was commissioned by a Wall Street cigar aficionado who wanted “an image of old fashioned machismo” and was successful enough to render the opinion of others irrelevant. “When every newspaper and every doctor is telling you not to smoke there’s a certain decadence when you not only smoke, you create a space to do it in,” Gibbs says.

After Sands Point came smoking dens in Manhattan and Montclair, New Jersey, and a few spots in between, many prompted by bans, (perhaps inspired by the smoking tent Arnold Schwarzenegger erected on the lawn of the California governor’s mansion) and all capturing a feel Gibbs calls “private speakeasy”, a mix of the forbidden and the historic.

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