Macanudo releases Vintage 2010. Every few years, there is an extraordinarily good year. Just like in wine and port, these years are worthy of the label vintage. And the company behind Macanudo, STG, says 2010 is worthy of that label. That year had the optimal rainfall, high humidity, the perfect amount of sun hours to grow fantastic tobacco. So they come out with the Macanudo Vintage 2010.

The Macanudo Vintage 2010 has a Connecticut Shade grown wrapper from the Connecticut River Valley. And it’s that 11-year-old wrapper that is considered to be of extremely high quality. The binder comes from Honduras. The filler comes from Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. Even though the name of the cigar is Macanudo Vintage 2010, only the wrapper stems from that year. The other tobaccos are aged between 3 to 5 years. The tobacco from the Dominican Republic is proprietary tobacco for General Cigars, the long filler division of Scandinavian Tobacco Group. It is Piloto Cubano 94 and it took General Cigars about a decade to bring the tobacco back into production.

Outstanding growing season

“We could not have asked for a better growing season than we had in 2010,” says Ernest Gocaj, who oversees the Connecticut growing operations and tobacco procurement for General Cigars. “Yet this is only part of the story. After such a beautiful crop is harvested, the hard work begins again because the most critical process for growing tobacco is curing. Given how unique and special this crop was, we were obsessive in monitoring the tobacco throughout the eight-week curing process, and ultimately brought its very best attributes to life.” The 2010 tobacco season saw the highest temperatures in the Connecticut River Valley with optimal rainfall. The tobacco yield that year was extremely silky.

The Macanudo Vintage comes in a 6⅝x54 Toro Grande, 6½x52 Torpedo, and a 7¼x48 Churchill. A box contains 20 cigars. Other vintage years for Macanudo are the Macanudo Vintage 2006, 2000, 1997, and 1993. The previous Macanudo Vintage releases did not come with a paper cigar band, but with a metal ring, heavy and unique. But the Macanudo Vintage 2010 will come with a paper ring and a cedar sleeve. The cigars are rolled at the General Cigar Dominicana factory.