USA

The United States is today above all the largest market for premium cigars — but it was once their workshop. And in the north of the country, tobacco still grows that gave two of the most celebrated wrapper terms in the world their names: Connecticut Shade and Connecticut Broadleaf.

Terroir and Regions

The Connecticut River valley in New England is an improbable location for tobacco: short summers, but light, sandy alluvial soils that lend the leaf a particular fineness. It was here, in the early twentieth century, that Connecticut Shade was developed from Sumatra seed — grown beneath large sheets of cloth stretched over the fields to diffuse sunlight. The result is golden, silky wrappers in the Claro range, for decades the very synonym for the mild, creamy cigar. Its counterpart grows on the same soils in full sun: Connecticut Broadleaf, a thick, dark, robust leaf that ferments into deep-black Maduros and stands for sweet, earthy power. Pennsylvania adds a further chapter, with vigorous Broadleaf tobacco grown around Lancaster County since the nineteenth century.

Ybor City and its Legacy

American cigar history has one capital: Tampa. In the 1880s, the entrepreneur Vicente Martínez Ybor moved his operation from Key West to Tampa and founded Ybor City — a factory town where soon thousands of Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants were rolling cigars. Around the turn of the century, Tampa bore the epithet “Cigar City” and produced handmade cigars on a scale that made the city world-famous. Machine production and economic depression ended the great era; what remains are restored factory buildings, a vivid culture of remembrance and individual manufactories that carry the tradition forward.

Today the United States plays a dual role: as the market by which the entire industry orients itself, and as the source of two wrappers without which neither the classic mild cigar nor the modern dark one would be conceivable.