Argh another blog post, another cigar I can’t seem to track down… as part of my cigar challenge. This time I have been on the look out for the V Centennial cigar.

Interestingly I am not the only one who has been trying to hunt this cigar brand down…

I dropped this Reddit member a message to see if they had any luck in finding this cigar since they posted approx 10 years ago… they got back to me with this…

So it looks like I’ve got no chance! This is a new community of cigar smokers I’ve stumbled across during this challenge. I particularly like the U.K. Cigars board. Worth a visit!

Right back to this cigar…

The V Centennial was introduced back in 1993. Pedro Martin created this cigar to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.

According to CigarMonthClub ‘The wrapper is Connecticut Shade from the USA, the filler is from the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and the binder is from Mexico. This is a spicy, medium to full bodied cigar. It’s woody, with a smooth herbal flavor.’

Pedro Martin was interviewed for Cigar Aficionado in 1999 where he discusses his career in the cigar industry. It is fascinating to hear that during his time working for a cigar company, Martin became one of ‘the original blind tasters’…

‘The company put a lot of cigars on my desk with numbers on them’ along with a ‘comment sheet’ to write down everything he ‘felt about the cigar’ that he was smoking. ‘In the beginning I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I knew how to smoke a cigar. I was a smoker. And, I used to blend cigars in Cuba. But I didn’t really know what to say about cigars. Nobody told me what to say about the cigars. I’d say, ‘I like it, I don’t like it, too strong, too mild, it’s a little bitter.’ You know, giving your impression about the cigar you are smoking. When I started, I didn’t know how to do it, because you have to educate your palate. By my last year there, my tasting skills were so good’

This really reasonated with me as I try to learn how to review cigars (for this blog) and watch many others doing the same describing a cigars ‘flavour notes’. Martin’s comments suggest that tasting the flavour of a cigar, is something to be ‘learned’.

Martin goes on to talk about the V Centennial…

‘From the beginning. When I created V Centennial in 1992, I was thinking of selling maybe 100,000 cigars. And the first year I sold 250,000. And in the second year I sold over a half a million, so that was a brand that exceeded my expectations. I could not sell that many more because I did not make that many more. I could have sold millions in 1995 and 1996.’

The whole ‘business side’ of making, promoting and ultimately selling cigars absolutely blows my mind. Something I’m keen to learn more about.

Upon further research into the V Centennial cigar, I came across these ads promoting this cigar on EBay…

I get really surprised seeing how expensive and glossy looking these ‘printed’ cigar ads were. I only ever see these kinds of ads in copies of Cigar Aficionado nowadays. I recently commented on this…

Those ‘printed’ ads are becoming as vintage as the cigar brands themselves somehow. This feels like a sign of our times and makes me realise how much impact the digital revolution must be impacting the promotion and sale of cigars internationally – I assume it’s helping.

Our modern day equivalent of the ‘printed’ ad, is the social media generation, the thousands of posts by influencers promoting different cigar brands to us… the live streams… the virtual herfs. Especially now we are amongst a pandemic. Things are changing rapidly and it appears everyone wants to get into these spaces.

Only a couple of days ago I saw the CGars Ltd are trying to reach out to the Tik Tok generation…

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeeEg9B7/

Looking through social media to see if people are smoking these cigars in the 2020’s, there is very little reference to the V Centennial 500 series. The odd post…

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAvWS39rylF/?igshid=gmvgc2wbz9if

Cigar Aficionado rated the V Centennial 500 Series Torpedo and scored it highly.

It appears I won’t have the chance to smoke a V Centennial cigar. But found it fascinating looking into the story behind these cigar brands. I suspect there will be absolutely no problem trying to track down the next cigar in my book… the Cohiba, but the question is, do I try the Behike? I suppose the question really is… do I have enough money to try that cigar… probably not 😂