Beautiful Old Barrel: Partagas Majestuosos

[El Presidente]

 

 

[NSXCIGAR]

Not sure why these weren't included in MRN. He must have been confident that they weren't produced post-Rev however I can't think of anything else listed in a later Cubatabaco catalog he omitted. 

And one went on the MO auction in 2019. Listed as 1970s but I'd be skeptical of that claim.

https://www.onlinecigarauctions.com/sold_lot_info.php?products_id=7251

[ATGroom]

6 hours ago, NSXCIGAR said:

Not sure why these weren't included in MRN. He must have been confident that they weren't produced post-Rev however I can't think of anything else listed in a later Cubatabaco catalog he omitted. 

Are we going through this one again... 🤪

MRN only includes post-1980, plus some select things from earlier. His book was never intended to be complete. There are hundreds of post-Revolution cigars not included either because he didn't have good info on the sizes, or else he ran out of time or space. You can find many in catalogues, and many have since shown up in auctions etc.

Source: have spoken about it with MRN.

[NSXCIGAR]

4 hours ago, ATGroom said:

Are we going through this one again... 🤪

MRN only includes post-1980, plus some select things from earlier. His book was never intended to be complete. There are hundreds of post-Revolution cigars not included either because he didn't have good info on the sizes, or else he ran out of time or space. You can find many in catalogues, and many have since shown up in auctions etc.

Source: have spoken about it with MRN.

I know...

First I've heard the post-1980 claim. There are many cigars in MRN discontinued in the 1970s. More than what I'd call "select things." 

And we've of course discussed this before but I think the claim of "hundreds" is just not supported. I've found only maybe 20 and the only one that comes to mind that actually appeared in marketing materials as late as the 1970s is the RA Grandes albeit this was a UK print. A rare glaring omission. 

I will grant that there may have been cigars that carried over in the 1960-1962 period that were technically post-Rev but for MRN to miss something that was so prominently featured in a Cubatabaco catalog from the 70s that he very likely would have had access to is unusual. 

I've certainly come around to accepting that MRN did miss a fair amount of post-Rev cigars but I'd put that number in the range of around 20 that I've been able to confirm and almost all of them can't be found in any catalog. Punch Rayados come to mind there. And yes, he did miss many of the Dunhill and Fox Selections no doubt. Those can get fairly into the weeds and it's quite impressive that he was able to find as many as he did. But again, many of those cigars wouldn't have appeared in any catalogs or lists he would have had access to. 

My position still remains that MRN got almost everything there was to get particularly if it appeared in any catalog. Missing 20-30 cigars out of 500+ is nothing short of amazing and it's quite unusual to see something like the Partagas Majestuosos missed. That's what I would call a glaring omission and those are quite rare for MRN. 

[99call]

On 8/6/2024 at 7:11 PM, NSXCIGAR said:

Punch Rayados come to mind there

You're "Punch Rayados" seemed to exist in the same era as the rest of these names. 

[El Presidente]

Love it 

[NSXCIGAR]

 

17 hours ago, 99call said:

You're "Punch Rayados" seemed to exist in the same era as the rest of these names. 

Are those all post-Rev? If not all it means is the Rayados also existed pre-Rev.

Do we think that the "Lees and Son, Newark" is Newark-on-Trent in England or Newark, NJ? Or the Park Lane Selection a carriage road in England or the Park Lane Hotel in New York? 

This kind of prolific customization is something I really haven't seen outside of pre-Rev.

[99call]

10 hours ago, NSXCIGAR said:

Are those all post-Rev? If not all it means is the Rayados also existed pre-Rev.

Do we think that the "Lees and Son, Newark" is Newark-on-Trent in England or Newark, NJ? Or the Park Lane Selection a carriage road in England or the Park Lane Hotel in New York? 

This kind of prolific customization is something I really haven't seen outside of pre-Rev.

I included the Macanudo, as the labels say Jamaica, and that would signal production definitely post 1959. 

It's useful to watch this video all the way through, but particularly from the 9:30 mark forward

It highly likely 100's if not 1000's of stores all across the UK an Europe have private selection that they tapered off from the start of the 1960's through the mid 1970's 

Did you know that Jacky Bonvin commissioned his own 'Seleccion Luciano' in 6 different Hoyo and then Partagas blends, named after his wife Lucie. Philippe himself dates the programme in the 1970s, which the box confirms. This is 6 cigar added to your list in one go, and that is just one of 100's of suppliers all over the Europe. 

To me I just can't understand your angle. You seem to be placing a huge tariff of significance, on what you have seen, as if it is representative of all that is out there, and then every time we do this, it only take a few passing searches from someone like @ATGroom to dredge up another haul of stuff that disproves your conviction.   

I'm not having a go at you, and I do not profess to be an authority on Cuban cigars or production or anything, I know the tiniest of fraction of what there is to know about Cuban cigars, and every week I see something that I've never seen before that throws all previous assumptions out of the window.      

We all accept in the present day the phrase "Cuba being Cuba" i.e. a rag tag shit show of disorganisation, where oddities are abound. Why on earth would that be different in the 1960 &70's and 80's?

Whether a box of Partagas Coronas was simply rebadged as "Harrods Super Seleccion's No 1", or Someone like Jacky Bonvin had an actual commissioning blending involvement, the notion that all of this stopped on a dime at a specific date is for the birds. I think the market would still be flooded with this stuff well into the early 1970's.

Again your angle on this to me is like Schrodinger's cat. None of this cigars exist in your head until you see them, then when you do see them, they do exist. This would be fine if you said "in my experience I do not believe these cigars to exist", but quite often you seem to have a desire to word things in a way, as if you have conclusive proof/evidence, and I just don't understand the desire to be so definitive. 

[NSXCIGAR]

8 hours ago, 99call said:

We all accept in the present day the phrase "Cuba being Cuba" i.e. a rag tag shit show of disorganisation, where oddities are abound. Why on earth would that be different in the 1960 &70's and 80's?

Whether a box of Partagas Coronas was simply rebadged as "Harrods Super Seleccion's No 1", or Someone like Jacky Bonvin had an actual commissioning blending involvement, the notion that all of this stopped on a dime at a specific date is for the birds. I think the market would still be flooded with this stuff well into the early 1970's.

Again your angle on this to me is like Schrodinger's cat. None of this cigars exist in your head until you see them, then when you do see them, they do exist. This would be fine if you said "in my experience I do not believe these cigars to exist", but quite often you seem to have a desire to word things in a way, as if you have conclusive proof/evidence, and I just don't understand the desire to be so definitive. 

My position is and always has been that MRN's omissions were minimal. That's it. Not that he got everything or that there aren't cigars he missed. That his work is so thorough that a cigar should be presumed not to exist until confirmed so. Contrary to your statement that I'm constantly confronted with omissions from MRN I've only seen about 20 that were missed that could be confirmed by direct evidence to be post-Rev and authentic. Most of the "examples" I've been presented with to counter that claim are from the MO UK auction which is, to put it kindly, not credible and unreliable at best or sketchy images with insufficient evidence to date a box.

I'm also confused as to why you'd think the CC industry would simply continue on with business as usual in 1962 after total nationalization. I think the phrase "turn on a dime" is quite apt when you have a complete communist takeover of an entire industry and country. If there was ever a clear "before and after" period that was it. The two eras cannot be compared and as we know CC brands were pared down from many hundreds to just a handful virtually overnight. 

I'm always amazed at the constant claims that all these cigars were missed my MRN yet no one can ever produce conclusive direct evidence for them. If there were these hundreds examples should be easy to find but they are not. As I pointed out the only cigar I've ever been able to find in print in any materials from the 70s onward is the RA Grandes which is a rare glaring omission from MRN. Many retailers also kept cigars in their own catalogs well past 1962 that were never actually available post-Rev. 

I have no issues with Cuba slapping an XYZ label on any cigar as long as it came out of the factory that way in Cuba. As far as the Lucianos box I will say first the date of the box is not confirmed. He dates it to the 70s but he may have first seen it in the 70s and it was made in 1962. And I'd also even say the date 1963 as a very iffy year for pre-Rev & post-Rev as many things may have already been in the pipeline from 1962. This gets very hazy. As far as the other models he claims existed they may have stopped those in 1962-63 as well. Yes, I would presume he's correct but it's possible he's mistaken and until the box is conclusively dated I would only tentatively agree it is indeed a possible exception. The other models, show me some direct evidence. 

I'm the one asking for evidence of this multitude of cigars MRN missed. Over the last 10 years I've been presented with direct evidence of about 20. The claim of hundreds is just not supported by direct evidence. Suggestion, innuendo, indications, things on paper, etc. are not direct evidence particularly when we know for a fact many catalogs and lists showed many, many cigars that never existed post-Rev. Threads like these come up, someone finds one or two cigars and they say "gotcha" but my position has never been that MRN got everything. My position is that omissions are unusual and rare and that MRN earned the right to have omissions presumed invalid until otherwise. To take a relatively small number of cigars and extrapolate that to conclude MRN missed a significant amount is a faulty conclusion. 

[99call]

14 hours ago, NSXCIGAR said:

Most of the "examples" I've been presented with to counter that claim are from the MO UK auction which is, to put it kindly, not credible and unreliable at best or sketchy images with insufficient evidence to date a box.

I sold this box personally, there was nothing unreliable or not credible about it. It was from the 1970's, and it also came with a hand cut page from 'The Cigar Club''s  own catalogue (still in business, based near Watford) stuffed on the underside on the glassine paper. The selection No 20 was underlined in pencil on the page, and it was listed amongst other numbered Bolivar selection they offered. 

But...I guess I imaged this box, and the catalogue page supplied with it.

And yes I'm sure 100s of suppliers printed cigars in their catalogues they didn't sell, for the wonderful fun telling their clients they didn't actually stock that item...over and over and over again. 

[El Presidente]

8 hours ago, 99call said:

I included the Macanudo, as the labels say Jamaica, and that would signal production definitely post 1959. 

It's useful to watch this video all the way through, but particularly from the 9:30 mark forward

It highly likely 100's if not 1000's of stores all across the UK an Europe have private selection that they tapered off from the start of the 1960's through the mid 1970's 

Did you know that Jacky Bonvin commissioned his own 'Seleccion Luciano' in 6 different Hoyo and then Partagas blends, named after his wife Lucie. Philippe himself dates the programme in the 1970s, which the box confirms. This is 6 cigar added to your list in one go, and that is just one of 100's of suppliers all over the Europe. 

To me I just can't understand your angle. You seem to be placing a huge tariff of significance, on what you have seen, as if it is representative of all that is out there, and then every time we do this, it only take a few passing searches from someone like @ATGroom to dredge up another haul of stuff that disproves your conviction.   

I'm not having a go at you, and I do not profess to be an authority on Cuban cigars or production or anything, I know the tiniest of fraction of what there is to know about Cuban cigars, and every week I see something that I've never seen before that throws all previous assumptions out of the window.      

We all accept in the present day the phrase "Cuba being Cuba" i.e. a rag tag shit show of disorganisation, where oddities are abound. Why on earth would that be different in the 1960 &70's and 80's?

Whether a box of Partagas Coronas was simply rebadged as "Harrods Super Seleccion's No 1", or Someone like Jacky Bonvin had an actual commissioning blending involvement, the notion that all of this stopped on a dime at a specific date is for the birds. I think the market would still be flooded with this stuff well into the early 1970's.

Again your angle on this to me is like Schrodinger's cat. None of this cigars exist in your head until you see them, then when you do see them, they do exist. This would be fine if you said "in my experience I do not believe these cigars to exist", but quite often you seem to have a desire to word things in a way, as if you have conclusive proof/evidence, and I just don't understand the desire to be so definitive. 

Pure Gold 

[El Presidente]

8 minutes ago, 99call said:

I sold this box personally,   there was nothing unreliable or not credible about it.   It was from the 1970's, and it also came with a hand cut page from 'The Cigar Club''s  own catalogue (still in business, based near Watford)  stuffed on the underside on the glassine paper.   The selection No 20 was underlined in pen on the page, and it was listed amongst other numbered Bolivar selection they offered. 

but..... I guess I imaged this box, and the catalogue page supplied with it.

And yes I'm sure 100s of suppliers printed cigars in their catalogues they didn't sell,  for the wonderful fun telling their clients they didn't actually stock that item..........over and over and over again. 

 

Cheers Stefan. I haven't seen that box before 

[99call]

3 minutes ago, El Presidente said:

Cheers Stefan. I haven't seen that box before 

Seen what box??? It doesn't exist, remember?

[El Presidente]

3 minutes ago, 99call said:

Seen what box??? It doesn't exist, remember?

Caramba!   991   

[NSXCIGAR]

8 hours ago, 99call said:

I sold this box personally, there was nothing unreliable or not credible about it.

Most is the word I used. Great, so we're up to 22 omissions in MRN.  Only 178 to go before "hundreds."

And how exactly is fully acknowledging cigars omitted after direct evidence is provided denying their existence? I don't know where you come up with me denying anything other than specious claims that there are hundreds of cigars that exist when I've seen hard evidence of just over 20.

Show me hundreds and I'll immediately sing a different tune about MRN's thoroughness. So far it's a box or two that pops up every year and nothing more. I add a couple to the list which is a drop in the bucket.

 

8 hours ago, 99call said:

And yes I'm sure 100s of suppliers printed cigars in their catalogues they didn't sell, for the wonderful fun telling their clients they didn't actually stock that item...over and over and over again. 

I didn't think this was even in dispute. There are cigars in catalogs well into the 70s with cigars and even brands that were discontinued. How could a retailer know if Cuba was going to produce something again especially in the years immediately following the Revolution?

I don't know why they wouldn't keep something in the catalog that may be made again. When are retailers supposed to remove a cigar from their catalog if they're never explicitly told it's discontinued? There are even vendors now who still show pages with cigars discontinued a decade ago. 

[ATGroom]

I was really hoping not to get dragged into this whole thing again, but is seems we're doing this.

I think there is a pretty basic misunderstanding of what happened at the time of the Revolution.

In Havana in 1959 there were a handful of big factories (most of the the same ones we have now, Partagas, Upmann, La Corona, Larranaga, Romeo y Julieta etc) and then hundreds of chinchalitos which mostly were backyard level operations or not far above. When nationalization happened, the chinchalitos were all shut down, partly because they needed the labour in the big factories because of all the emigration that had happened around the Revolution, and partly because the chinchalitos had always been more or less sweatshops that paid below legal wages while the factories had strong pro-communist unions and fit much better with the socialist ideal.

So that's when all the boutique brands went.

The next big discontinuation happened after the embargo when all of the brands that had mostly served the US market went, partly because most of them had US owners so there was some dubiousness around copyright, partly as a bit of an insult to the Americans, and mainly because without the US there weren't buyers anymore.

In terms of day-to-day life at the Partagas factory though, there was never any moment when the communists came in and said "no no no, we don't make these decadent capitalist sizes anymore." There wasn't really any such thing as an "official catalogue." If you had the money you could just get whatever you wanted. Want a unique size, or the same size but called something else, no problem. There was no such thing as something that was "discontinued." Just stuff that wasn't ordered anymore. That is, until about 1980 when the whole industry was standardised, the ordering was centralised into Cubatabaco, and ordering was limited to the official list.

As for where it all is - well, we are talking about a 70 year old consumable product, so a lot is lost forever, but even so, it's everywhere! Here's a list I pulled from Mitchell's auctions last go around. Plenty more there if you take the time to go through it.

 

Any serious vintage collection you get a look at always has a bunch of "unheard-of" stuff. Here's some for you. All photographed by myself within the last 12 months. 

[JohnS]

Thanks for this information and thanks too for those wonderful photos of yesteryear, Alex! 👍

[99call]

Would love to know more about this box (which I believe John De Costa bought). He bought it in a lot of stuff from the 1980's and 90's. By the size of it, I can only imagine it was originally filled with 10 Fabulosos sized cigars.

[ATGroom]

11 minutes ago, 99call said:

I can only imagine it was originally filled with 10 Fabulosos sized cigars

Can confirm that's exactly what Fabulosos boxes looked like, so I'd agree likely 'just' Fabulosos with Harrod's branding.

[Fugu]

I’d say you guys are simply at cross purposes here. There is regular production and there is, and particularly – has been – a lot of commissioned production made for particular merchants or private persons. There have indeed been hundreds, still even after the revolution. And transitions are fluent, with certain commissioned formats occasionally having made it and making it into regular (so much so, that e.g. a merchant such as Dunhill even made it a cigar brand…). Sometimes, it isn’t even clear into which “category” a cigar falls, such as e.g. seen in the Bolívar Especiales, to name just one.

Actually reading Min Ron Nee brings some clarification. – He addresses this very point himself in his introductory part, speaking of the regular “current ‘Commercial Production’”, as opposed to “commissioned” humidors and cigars, which he states he did not include in the Encyclopedia.

As impressive as your collection of costero labels is, @99call, most of that is “commissioned” special production (your box of Selección Lucianos no different), and as such does not seem to be suitable to be disproving of the (valid) concerns brought up by @NSXCIGAR. Those vitolas had quite intentionally never made it into the Encyclopedia.

Therefore, I would not call it ‘omissions’ of MNR, but rather the man made a very deliberate selection of what he thought would qualify, by his standards, to have been included in his work (and as he freely grants, according to his “personal understandings or misunderstandings”, and likely aided by input from the experts with whom he collaborated). Nothing truly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about it, but perhaps still legitimate / worth debating.

[99call]

5 hours ago, Fugu said:

I’d say you guys are simply at cross purposes here. There is regular production and there is, and particularly – has been – a lot of commissioned production made for particular merchants or private persons. There have indeed been hundreds, still even after the revolution. And transitions are fluent, with certain commissioned formats occasionally having made it and making it into regular (so much so, that e.g. a merchant such as Dunhill even made it a cigar brand…). Sometimes, it isn’t even clear into which “category” a cigar falls, such as e.g. seen in the Bolívar Especiales, to name just one.

Actually reading Min Ron Nee brings some clarification.- He addresses this very point himself in his introductory part, speaking of the regular “current ‘Commercial Production’”, as opposed to “commissioned” humidors and cigars, which he states he did not include in the Encyclopedia.

As impressive as your collection of costero labels is, @99call, most of that is “commissioned” special production (your box of Selección Lucianos no different), and as such does not seem to be suitable to be disproving of the (valid) concerns brought up by @NSXCIGAR. Those vitolas had quite intentionally never made it into the Encyclopedia.

Therefore, I would not call it ‘omissions’ of MNR, but rather the man made a very deliberate selection of what he thought would qualify, by his standards, to have been included in his work (and as he freely grants, according to his “personal understandings or misunderstandings”, and likely aided by input from the experts with whom he collaborated). Nothing truly ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about it, but perhaps still legitimate / worth debating.

I am in 100% agreement in that MRN made a specific selection, and one that was on a certain mass of production, and not just available in specific locations around the world. That's what a sane human being would do.

But the contention seems to be that he only omitted a hand full of cigars. I think that's nonsense. 

I think there are three categories that were omitted.

1. Re-labelled cigars. From high street shops I.e. Harrods. Fortnum & Mason etc. I would say there would be easily over 500 of these.

2. Involved commissions as with the "Luciano's" where certain blend  or specific sizes could be requested. I would say there would be 50 to 100 of these.

3. Cigars that fluctuated in general production. Only ran for a small periods of time/dropped from production. I would say there would be 50 to 100 of these.

Again I would agree with you that MRN didn't miss these cigars, he purposefully choose to omit them. Simply because it would require A huge amount of extra work/images, with very little to say.  The book may have been more conclusive. But would have been twice the size and very stop start.

I don't think we are cross purposes. I think we know exactly our positions and there isn't any crossover. 

[Fugu]

3 hours ago, 99call said:

I don't think we are cross purposes. I think we know exactly our positions and there isn't any crossover.

Ok, perhaps I am missing the core objective of your dispute.

[NSXCIGAR]

4 hours ago, 99call said:

1. Re-labelled cigars. From high street shops I.e. Harrods. Fortnum & Mason etc. I would say there would be easily over 500 of these.

2. Involved commissions as with the "Luciano's" where certain blend  or specific sizes could be requested. I would say there would be 50 to 100 of these.

3. Cigars that fluctuated in general production. Only ran for a small periods of time/dropped from production. I would say there would be 50 to 100 of these.

So there's maybe 600 or 700 cigars in MRN and your claim is approximately an equal number were omitted? Where are they? You can't possibly get me to believe that out of that many cigars only 20-25 have surfaced. You really don't see how wild that claim sounds? 

I can completely agree with you that based on what I've seen, read and heard over the last 25 years there should be all these cigars in all the categories you list. There's a great deal of indirect evidence. But when one drills down to actually confirm the existence of these cigars almost none can actually be shown with direct evidence to exist. You may want to operate on speculation but when it comes to CCs I don't. It's far too hazy and and inconsistent a field to be assuming or speculating.

If a significant number these cigars appeared I'd change my tune immediately. I'm waiting to be proven wrong. I have no personal stake in anything. I'm not a special pleader for MRN in any way. If he omitted 600 cigars then so be it. But if he didn't then he should be credited. 

[NSXCIGAR]

15 hours ago, ATGroom said:

Here's a list I pulled from Mitchell's auctions last go around. Plenty more there if you take the time to go through it.

I'm going to have to push back a bit in using the MO auctions as any reliable source. There's no authentication that goes on there and usually only one photo per listing. 

As far as your boxes pictured, great stuff. You've dated it all post-Rev? 

[ATGroom]

7 hours ago, NSXCIGAR said:

I'm going to have to push back a bit in using the MO auctions as any reliable source. There's no authentication that goes on there and usually only one photo per listing. 

As far as your boxes pictured, great stuff. You've dated it all post-Rev? 

Yes, I selected the most indisputably post-Rev. Most are clearly at least 70s, and a couple of them are 1990s.🤪

 

There's plenty of evidence. The catalogues - we're not talking about speculative directories of cigars, they're like "our price list for October 1964." It's not like online where you add an entry to the database and it stays there forever - these are printed catalogues being sent to customers. That stuff was in stock. But you dismiss all those as a matter of course.

Then there's Mitchell's auction listings. Hundreds of different things over decades have been sold. But none of it is good enough because Mitchell can't date or authenticate. Mitchell's is the only real online resource for this stuff with a big history, so if that is all inadmissible then I don't see how we can ever prove it to your standards.

If my personal testimony is acceptable, then I've seen many many things in private collections in London and Hong Kong, and know enough to know that that's the tip of the iceberg for what is out there. I've also spoken at length with MRN about the resources he used to prepare his first book, and what he had planned for his second, so I know how much he knew was omitted from the first one.

That's my final word on the subject.