halfwheel

News: A.J. Fernandez Expanding San Lotano Line Through Meier & Dutch

In the same interview where he announced plans for El Mayimbe, Abdel Fernandez told Cigar.com’s Alex Svenson that San Lotano brand would be expanding with a Meier & Dutch exclusive, San Lotano The Bull. It’s expect to be available shortly through the distribution company that is associated with Cigars International.   San Lotano The Bull [...]

IPCPR 2012: A.J. Fernandez

Winner of the award for best booth placement at IPCPR goes to A.J. Fernandez, which was literally right behind the entrance. This year the booth was bigger, a lot bigger than Las Vegas, a good representation of the company who introduced San Lotano only two years ago. PinoleroThis year was the year of Pinolero. Six [...]

Review: San Lotano Oval Maduro Corona

Late in 2011, rumors started flying around the web that A.J. Fernandez would be adding a Maduro wrapped version of its extremely popular Oval line. The new cigars have the exact same filler and binder as the norma Oval, but they replace the Ecuadorian Habano 2000 wrapper with a Habano Maduro one. Talking about the [...]

Weekly News (April 2, 2012)

Editor’s Note: This week was a solemn week for the cigar industry. Manny Ferrero of Ashton Distributors passed away at the Tobacconist Association of America conference in Cabo San Lucas. I only met Manny once and even to me, a stranger, he was kind and overly enthusiastic about not just Ashton, but the industry as [...]

The Consensus: 2011 Awards

For the 2010 rendition of this concept, click here to see Brian Hewitt’s work. Before anyone starts, I started this long before Bill Berris posted his rendition of this a few days at Cigar Snapshot. (Bill’s serves as a interesting sample of this, although there are noticeable differences beyond population size.) The concept was simple, [...]

Weekly News (November 28, 2011)

Editor’s Note: The first story in the news this week is surrounding a new Rocky Patel, and it’s a bit controversial. I explain the details after the jump, but it’s led to a lot of speculation amongst manufacturers, consumers and retailers as to what really went on. Truth be told, there is one common denominator, [...]

Weekly News (October 31, 2011)

Editor’s Note: Happy Halloween. It’s another relatively slow week of cigar news. It will be like this going forward for most of the rest of the year due to a variety of push and pull factors. I wouldn’t expect a whole lot of groundbreaking information leaking in the coming months, but then again surprises are [...]

Editorial: The Business of A.J.

I preface this with: I actually think the Oval is a decent cigar and this is by no means the first time this has happened; Jason Wood. Unfortunately, A.J. Fernandez has sort of fallen into my lap in terms of being the target topic of the next editorial. At stake are two issues: the “A.J. [...]

Review: San Lotano Oval Petit Robusto

It was almost a month ago that we started our 2011 IPCPR cigar reviews, and we are still going strong, there are so many cigars to find and review that it makes this time of year very time consuming, but fun! In continuing we arrive at today’s review, the new San Lotano Oval made by [...]

News: San Lotano Oval (Updated)

A new shape, or at least that’s what I’m told. It’s got a Habano 2000 wrapper and aged Nicaraguan filler. The San Lotano Oval, which took five years to develop, will come from A.J. Fernandez’ Tabacalera Fernandez under the San Lotano moniker. It will be on display at the IPCPR show in July, hitting B&Ms [...]