David Savona on Cigar Aficionado's web site that he will be dating all his boxed cigars .


The other day I smoked a eight-year-old La Flor Dominicana 2000 Series cigar. It was delicious, refined, balanced and elegant. I enjoyed it much more than I had when it was a young cigar. Clearly the age had given it a certain something that just wasn't there in its youth.


How did I know it was eight years old? Right there, printed on the cover of the box, was a star, inside of which appeared the words "rolled in 1998." Can't get much clearer than that.

If that box of cigars had been a bottle of wine, the date would have been nothing to talk about. But what makes a date on a cigar box so unique is that so few cigarmakers include such information.

The Cubans date every box, but they'd prefer that the consumer not know the date: such information used to be encrypted. The first time I went to Cuba, in 1996, I sat with our European editor, James Suckling, in the Havana offices of Habanos S.A. as he explained to a Habanos official how we at Cigar Aficionado were about to print two words that were certain to infuriate him -- NIVEL ACUSO. At that time, NIVEL ACUSO was a secret code known only to a few. The letters in the words corresponded with the numbers one through zero. With the code, you could decipher when your cigars were packaged, and therefore determine their age. It was key information to collectors, but something the Cubans didn't want to see the light of day.


read the rest of his post at Cigar Aficionado