Graycliff Platinum Series Presidente

Founded by Graycliff Resort owner, Enrico Garzaroli, the Graycliff Cigar Company has achieved fame worldwide for high-end, handcrafted cigars produced in the lush tropical setting of the prestigious Bahamian resort by the same name. The site of the Graycliff Resort was originally a church built in 1666, one of Nassau's first structures and certainly most prominent. Known as the "Pride of the Bahamas," this historic site later served as a fort before becoming home to the 5-star resort it is today. Winston Churchill, Aristotle Onassis, Paul Newman, King Constantine and the Beatles are among the many who have visited over the years. An enthusiastic cigar aficionado, Garzaroli dreamed of producing truly top-shelf cigars to complement the fine wine and cuisine in his first class restaurants. He partnered with Cuban cigar legend Avelino Lara to create Graycliff Cigar Company. Lara was responsible for Castro's personal smokes and then the Cohiba line. Graycliffs—initially offered as an amenity for guests at the hotel—are handmade in a small area behind the renowned Nassau resort. With an unyielding devotion to superior quality and consistency, Lara oversees the production of each cigar. Only a few hundred are rolled each day, and they're known for exceptional body and flavor without being overly harsh. Because of their focus on quality, they have thrived in spite of entering the premium cigar business in 1998 at the end of the cigar boom. Demand has mushroomed so much that Graycliff has expanded their manufacturing operations to Nicaragua, exporting their exacting standards as well.

Graycliff Platinum Series… the name just says it all! What makes this cigar worthy of being platinum is the rare, one time a year production using tiny allotments of vintage, hand-selected tobaccos. With that said, only a measly 80,000 cigars are produced each year. This medium to full bodied beauty is loaded with the flavor of pepper, notes of wood and earth, and a long finish of sweet cedar and cream. All that flavor comes from the super oily and leathery Ecuadorian Habano Sun Grown wrapper, spicy Habano Cuban-seed binder, and rich Nicaraguan long-fillers that are select ligeros from Estelí and visos from the Jalapa Valley. We couldn’t wait to dive into ours and we did with a White Russian.

Honduras has been a tobacco growing and cigar manufacturing area for hundreds of years, but it was the Communist revolution in Cuba that really put Honduras on the map. In the 1960s, many Cuban cigar makers fled their homeland and arrived in Honduras to re-establish their way of life. The immigrants took advantage of the climate, soil, and geography, which were well-suited to tobacco growing, and began producing high quality cigars. The center of the Honduran cigar industry is the city of Danli and the nearby Jamastran Valley. The majority of the world’s pure Corojo tobacco is grown here, now that Cuba has stopped production of this iconic, spicy, and rich variety in favor of Corojo hybrids. Other important areas of Honduran cigar production include the Talanga Valley, Copan, and Trojes.