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?...Robustos are a recent phenomenon....
But it's fascinating to think that when Chase entered the cigar trade back in the late 1970s, he says "the word robusto did not exist. In fact, it did not make its first public appearance until 1989."
This doesn't mean that robustos were not made in Cuba before the late 1980s. The Partagas Serie D No. 4 apparently made its public debut sometime in the 1930s, while other popular robustos such as Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2, Bolivar Royal Corona and Ramon Allones Specially Selected date back to the 1950s and 1960s. But these smokes were not widely available and only the most select connoisseurs bought them, particularly in the U.K. market.
....I remember when I first started going to Cuba for this magazine in the early 1990s, most of the cigars Cubans themselves smoked were lonsdales and coronas. I always remember the first time I met Havana's best cigar merchant, Enrique Mons, in 1991, and he told me that the lonsdale was the perfect shape for the cigar, giving you all the flavor you need for all the time you had to smoke.
At the time, Mons probably would have never believed how popular the robusto would become. A few months ago in Havana when I was with him in his shop, he said that most people were buying the Partagas Serie D No. 4. "That's clearly our most popular cigar at the moment," he said.
And it all started with Cohiba Robusto. As Chase explained, the Cubans believed that their flagship brand needed an upgrade after close to two decades of the same thing, so they came up with the new sizes in 1989: the Esplendido, the Exquisito and the Robusto. They certainly never realized at the time that they were about to revolutionize the cigar industry with the robusto.
"It was the robusto that caught everyone's imagination," said Chase. "The name described the cigar's comparatively short, stubby shape perfectly, not only in Spanish but also in English and most other European languages."
Interestingly, the name robusto was not the brainchild of some marketing wizard in Spain, France or even Cuba. It was simply the name the rollers used to describe the shape in the factory, or vitola de galera. For example, rollers call the double corona a prominente, and a torpedo a pir?mide. The robusto was one of the first times a vitola de galera became a big success as a vitola de salida, or the name given a shape in the marketplace.
And most of us have been smoking and enjoying robustos ever since.
CA Mag Dec 2007.
Thoughts...?
?...Robustos are a recent phenomenon....
But it's fascinating to think that when Chase entered the cigar trade back in the late 1970s, he says "the word robusto did not exist. In fact, it did not make its first public appearance until 1989."
This doesn't mean that robustos were not made in Cuba before the late 1980s. The Partagas Serie D No. 4 apparently made its public debut sometime in the 1930s, while other popular robustos such as Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2, Bolivar Royal Corona and Ramon Allones Specially Selected date back to the 1950s and 1960s. But these smokes were not widely available and only the most select connoisseurs bought them, particularly in the U.K. market.
....I remember when I first started going to Cuba for this magazine in the early 1990s, most of the cigars Cubans themselves smoked were lonsdales and coronas. I always remember the first time I met Havana's best cigar merchant, Enrique Mons, in 1991, and he told me that the lonsdale was the perfect shape for the cigar, giving you all the flavor you need for all the time you had to smoke.
At the time, Mons probably would have never believed how popular the robusto would become. A few months ago in Havana when I was with him in his shop, he said that most people were buying the Partagas Serie D No. 4. "That's clearly our most popular cigar at the moment," he said.
And it all started with Cohiba Robusto. As Chase explained, the Cubans believed that their flagship brand needed an upgrade after close to two decades of the same thing, so they came up with the new sizes in 1989: the Esplendido, the Exquisito and the Robusto. They certainly never realized at the time that they were about to revolutionize the cigar industry with the robusto.
"It was the robusto that caught everyone's imagination," said Chase. "The name described the cigar's comparatively short, stubby shape perfectly, not only in Spanish but also in English and most other European languages."
Interestingly, the name robusto was not the brainchild of some marketing wizard in Spain, France or even Cuba. It was simply the name the rollers used to describe the shape in the factory, or vitola de galera. For example, rollers call the double corona a prominente, and a torpedo a pir?mide. The robusto was one of the first times a vitola de galera became a big success as a vitola de salida, or the name given a shape in the marketplace.
And most of us have been smoking and enjoying robustos ever since.
CA Mag Dec 2007.
Thoughts...?
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