MY MOST MEMORABLE CIGARS
Aaron Sigmond is the founding editor of both Smoke
magazine, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary
this year, and The Cigar Report. He is the author of the
Amazon.com bestseller Playboy: The Book of Cigars,
whose second edition will be released March 2016.
WHENEVER I’M ASKED to name the most memorable cigars
I’ve smoked, I never reflect on the cigars themselves, but rather
on the circumstances of the smoke. If I’m asked to narrow
my choices to two, that’s a challenge, given that I’ve been in
and out of the cigar trade for some 25 years, and a devotee for
more than 30. One, though, always rises to the top: my first ver
e
Romeo y Julieta Churchill, a vintage 1950s one at that.
I was on a deep ea fishing charter in the Mexican
s
Pacific in the mid 980s when I hooked my first
1
marlin. (It was quite a day of firsts.) It took me
nearly an hour to land, and when I did, my then
young mind deemed it my Hemingway moment.
This wasn’t quite The Old Man and the Sea, or
the boat anything like the Pilar, but I nonetheless
felt something primal as I imagined Hemingway
would have.
Once the marlin was onboard, a gent I barely knew
handed me a cigar that he’d brought for himself
to be smoked when he caught a fish — which
he hadn’t done so far. He told me I’d earned it,
but to this day, this one cigar from a very casual
acquaintance has always exemplified much more:
It’s an eternal signifier of all the men I’ve met, the
fraternal camaraderie I’ve experienced and, in
some cases, the now lifelong friends I’ve made in
both giving and receiving a single cigar.
Ironically, I recall neither the man’s name nor
anything about him, though I do have photos of
the vaction. The cigar itself I smoked in a breezy
cabin on a Mexican sport sher on the way back
fi
to port, with a Coronita and a tequila to keep the
cigar and me company.
Beyond that, I struggle to identify a singular cigar
memory: my first (Havana) Davidoff No. 2 with
Edward Sahakian a year before that Mexico trip,
perhaps; the custom smokes I commissioned from
Padrón and Nat Sherman for magazine events;
the back o ack Partagas 150 cigars at events in
t b
Havana and Orlando; the Cohiba 30th Anniversary
cigar and event, again in Havana; my first Davidoff
Special R, smoked at it