Sweesher Sweets everywhere
DO PREMIUM CIGARS REALLY MATTER?
Handmade cigars account for just 3% of worldwide sales
Los Angeles, September 11 – “The global cigar market, estimated at roughly 15 billion units, is highly concentrated in geographic terms. More than 96% of all sales are recorded in Western Europe (Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom) and the United States, which account for 55% and 41% of the market.”
That’s the introduction to Altadis, S.A.’s overview of the worldwide cigar market. It’s accompanied by a chart which shows that:
• 97% of all cigars sold worldwide are machine-made and only 3% are premium handmades.
• 72% of the monetary sales volume comes from mass-market cigars and just 28% from premiums.
It’s about the same story in the U.S., where the Cigar Association of America estimated that 9.05 billion cigars were consumed nationally in 2005. However, only about 4.7% of these were premium cigars and the rest were machine-made. The dominant cigars in the U.S. are not Macanudo and Romeo y Julieta, but Swisher Sweets, Phillies and White Owl!
And those brands aren’t standing pat. Sweet and flavored cigars have been all the rage and Phillies has now introduced – it had to happen – a Sugarillo size (4 1/2 inches by 28 ring) “when sweet isn’t enough.”
And Dutch Masters, which is reported to be the leading brand in the nation with a natural-leaf wrapper, introduced Honey Sports Cigarillos in February and was honored with a “Best New Product Award” in the tobacco category by Convenience Store News.
So what about these cigars? Zino Davidoff, in the 1984 edition of The Connoisseur’s Book of the Cigar called them “candy,” noting they are “lighter than light – virtually colorless – lightened, treated with powder or other products, scented and washed”. To be fair, we had to try them out . . . and we did:
Phillies:
[U.S.: available in 14 sizes]
Made by Altadis U.S.A. in Selma, Alabama, there are standard-style cigars in addition to many flavored shapes. The non-flavored shapes have a homogenized tobacco leaf wrapper and binder and short-fill tobacco inside. The top is pierced, an advantage for short-filler cigars since a standard guillotine cut might open the cigar too widely and disturb its integrity.
This is a mild cigar, with a slightly spicy aroma and a sweet taste on the finish. It smoked quickly and easily and offered a modest, toasty flavor without much brightness or depth compared to a long-filler, handmade cigar. Simple and basic, it was easy to light up and easy to put down.
Swisher Sweets:
[U.S.: available in 11 sizes]
This Jacksonville, Florida tradition from the Swisher International is the nation’s largest-selling cigar. It’s aptly named, as its sugary sweetness dominates the taste.
%%pagebreak%% Made with homogenized tobacco leaf wrapper and binder, with short-fill tobaccos inside, the Sweets smoke quickly with a mild body, a medium finish and a slightly spicy aroma. But the sugar taste is direct and constant, although there is a touch of spice on the finish in the second half.
Swisher Sweets are forthright and honest. They are stunningly sweet and proud of it. Smokers looking for complexity and a toned approach to taste should look elsewhere and should be ready to pay more for it. The cigars we tried averaged 80 cents each, including California’s 46.76% tax on the wholesale price.
White Owl:
[U.S.: available in 12 sizes]
Made by Swedish Match in Dothan, Alabama, White Owls date back to 1887. Of the three market-leading machine-made brands we sampled, this brand was a bit more complex and offered a mild-to-medium-bodied smoke.
Like the Phillies and the Swisher Sweets, White Owl uses a homogenized tobacco leaf wrapper and binder and short filler. The top is pierced and there is a toasty aroma to go along with a slightly sweet taste.
You really don’t notice this cigar much as you smoke it and the flavor is without complexity and rather one-dimensional. That doesn’t make it a bad cigar, just an ordinary one that can be smoked easily to pass the time of day.
Normally, we give grades to cigars, but to compare these machine-made leaders with premium, handmade cigars is to compare apples and asparagus. Both can be eaten, but they are otherwise completely different. The non-flavored Phillies and White Owl lines demonstrated a shallow flavor without any complexity, balance or brightness. The Swisher Sweets were as advertised, incredibly sweet and one-dimensional. Moreover, the firmness and feel that smokers expect from a handmade cigar is absent from these brands, all of which feel a little weak in construction compared to long-filler, all-tobacco cigars.
That said, these machine-made market leaders most certainly are cigars and they have their place. Given what they are and what they are meant to be, all would receive a grade of “C: Satisfactory” in their own category of machine-made cigars. But let’s not compare them to handmade cigars; that would be unfair.
So, do premium cigars matter?
Yes, they do. After taste-testing the nation’s leading brands which sell in the hundreds of millions, one can recognize that there is a place for grape juice and a place for fine wines.
The texture, solid feel and complexity of almost any handmade, long-filler cigar is a joy for the hand, lips and teeth after having smoked mass-market brands. And the brightness of flavor present in the best handmades – whether caramelized, creamy, spicy or peppery – is otherworldly in comparison.
Cigars are generally regarded as a luxury item. Premium, handmade cigars may take up only a small part of the market, but like their brethren in other industries – like Aston-Martin, Bentley, Bugatti, Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and others in the automotive world – there is a clear difference.
Viva la difference!
~ Rich Perelman
