Reading a cigar’s origin off the box
Where it was made, where the leaf came from, and why those are different questions.
"Hecho en Nicaragua" tells you where it was rolled, not where the tobacco grew. Those two facts are usually different, and a box will state the first far more clearly than the second.
The wording that matters
- "Hecho a mano" / "Totalmente a mano": handmade; the second is the stronger claim.
- "Hecho en …": country of manufacture, which is a customs fact.
- "Made in … from … tobacco": the closest thing to an honest origin statement, and the least common.
None of this is regulated the way food labelling is. The box tells you where the factory stands, and the leaf origin lives in the marketing material if anywhere.
Cuban boxes
Cuban boxes carry a factory code and a date code stamped on the underside, plus the Habanos seal and a barcode. Those codes identify when and where it was boxed, which is genuinely useful information and unique to the origin.
Do this: photograph the underside of a box when it arrives, before it goes into storage. Codes rub off, boxes get reused for other cigars, and the photograph is the only version of that information you will still have in five years.
The word "puro"
A puro is a cigar in which all the tobacco comes from one country. It is a real claim and a useful one — a Nicaraguan puro is a genuinely different proposition from a Nicaraguan-rolled blend using Ecuadorian wrapper and Dominican filler.
What to record
Country of manufacture and, where you can find it, wrapper origin. Those two together predict your preferences far better than a brand name does — and they are the fields that a note without them cannot reconstruct later.
The fields the scan fills in
When the sommelier reads a band it fills in the brand, line, format, wrapper and origin. That is exactly the set of fields that makes a journal comparable across years — and none of it is typing you have to do while the cigar is burning.
Read next
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