2023 Awards: Company of the Year

For our 2023 awards, we have changed the nomination process for Factory of the Year and Company of the Year.

In the past, each writer has been asked to nominate as many factories or companies as they would like for each award. After that was completed, each writer was then asked to rank all the nominees. The winner was determined by the cumulative rankings.

For 2023, the nominees were determined based on the five highest-scoring factories or compansed based on our regular reviews in 2023. Each writer was then asked to rank the nominees by whatever method they wanted.

This change was done because it better aligns with how halfwheel sees the cigar world: through the lens of new cigars.

For better and worse, we focus on new cigars. Whether it’s reviews, news stories, event coverage, etc.—we spend almost all of our time writing about new cigars, and very little time writing about cigars that have been on the market for 10 years. It’s not that new is better, rather, new tends to be what interests the largest amount of readers. We think it makes more sense to at least use that lens as a way to narrow down the options. That said, this award didn’t go to the company with the highest average score. — Charlie Minato.

2023 Company of the Year — RoMa Craft Tobac

In terms of how it fared as judged via halfwheel reviews, 2023 was a bit of an odd year for RoMa Craft Tobac and the Fábrica de Tabacos Nica Sueño S.A. factory that makes nearly every cigar the company sells.

On one hand, no Nica Sueño-made RoMa Craft Tobac product scored above a 90, a very important line of demarcation for our awards. On the other hand, RoMa Craft Tobac won this award by receiving no ranking worse than a second-place vote.

We reviewed just three cigars from RoMa Craft Tobac in 2023, all of them scoring at least a 90:

• Intemperance Volstead VO 1920 Noble Experiment (90)
• Intemperance Volstead VO 1920 Senator Volstead Prerelease (90)
• Quinquagenario (91)

The surprise here is probably the one you cannot pronounce.

It’s not that it’s surprising that Quinquagenario is a good cigar; rather, after more than a decade of exclusively making cigars with its own factory, RoMa Craft Tobac sold a cigar made at Ernesto-Perez Carrillo Jr.’s Tabacalera La Alianza S.A. Different factory, different country. Surprise.

In a cool way, all of those three cigars are related. Skip Martin, co-founder of RoMa Craft Tobac, said that working with Perez-Carrillo Jr. gave him a better understanding of working with Sumatra hybrids grown in Ecuador, which paved the way for the Volstead VO 1920 blend.

In a year that I valued consistency more than I ever have before, it seems necessary to acknowledge how we feel about this company and its main factory. Since 2018, RoMa Craft Tobac or Nica Sueño has either won or been a finalist for Company of the Year or Factory of the Year:

• 2018 — Honorable Mention (Factory of the Year)
• 2019 — Honorable Mention (Company of the Year)
• 2020 — Factory of the Year
• 2021 — Honorable Mention (Company of the Year)
• 2022 — Factory of the Year
• 2023 — Company of the Year

While this award may not be as prestigious as winning our Top 25 or even consistently finishing in our Top 5—to date, RoMa Craft Tobac’s best finish was #3 in 2016—I think the above streak is probably tougher to accomplish. Random chance has a much greater impact on one blend than it has on six years of work.

RoMa Craft Tobac is unlikely to end up as the name mentioned after Arturo Fuente, Davidoff and Padrón; that’s probably due to longevity and size, it’s not due to gaps in quality or consistency. While still young and small compared to those three, RoMa Craft Tobac has been around for more than a decade. At this point, we know what the company does. It is capable of making some of the very best cigars in the world, but it does a better job of consistently putting out very good cigars.

If you are curious about how committed RoMa Craft Tobac is to consistency, just look at its most disappointing action of 2023. The company announced that it will be discontinuing its original blend, CroMagnon, because it has been unable to source Connecticut broadleaf wrapper that meets its standards. While CroMagnon will live on with a new blend and different packaging, most companies would have done something different and hoped no one noticed. That’s not RoMa Craft Tobac’s style, that’s not why it gets recognition like this.

Honorable Mentions: Meerapfel Cigar and Plasencia Cigars.

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Here is the remaining schedule for awards week:

• Jan. 18, 2024 (Thursday) 12 p.m. CST — Packaging Awards
• Jan. 19, 2024 (Friday) 12 p.m. CST — Top 25 Cigars
• Jan. 22, 2024 (Monday) 12 p.m. CST — The Consensus 2023