Aladino Candela Toro Debuting at TPE 2024

Last year, JRE Tobacco Co. showed off the Aladino Candela Robusto at TPE 2023. This year, the Aladino Candela Toro will go on sale during TPE 2024.

The Aladino Candela Toro is a 6 x 50 toro that is made entirely of Honduran tobacco, capped off by a corojo-seed green candela wrapper. The MSRP is set at $10.50 per cigar and production is limited to 1,200 boxes of 20 cigars, which will begin shipping in February.

Candela refers to a process that produces the green-colored cigars that always get more visible this time of year due to St. Patrick’s Day. Sometimes the cigars end up very green-looking, other times they can be a tan color with a green hint. Whatever the shade, candela is the result of a process and not a varietal of tobacco such as criollo or habano. In order to create candela tobacco, the tobacco is heated in a specialized barn at much higher temperatures than other tobacco. The idea is to heat the tobacco by incrementally increasing the temperature which removes the moisture from the leaves. Eventually, the moisture is removed, and the leaves become dry but are green because the chlorophyll hasn’t been removed, something that happens with the slower process that the vast majority of tobacco used for premium cigars goes through, which results in the light tan to dark brown colors of those leaves.

“We would like to push the candela wrapper’s popularity as a homage to my grandfather Julio since he was the largest candela grower in the 80s and 90s when candela was the dominant wrapper in the industry,” said Vivi Eiroa in an email to halfwheel last year when the robusto was introduced.

Many decades ago, candela was the most common wrapper found on cigars in the U.S., though at this point, it’s closer to a novelty than a fad. For tobacco growers and cigar makers, candela has one major advantage: time. The whole process of heating the tobacco takes less than a week and the tobacco requires far less processing once it heads to factories.

So far, JRE Tobacco Co. has not committed to making the Aladino Candela a regular production line. Like the Toro, the Candela Robusto was limited. In November, the Aladino Candela Queen’s Perfecto, the second vitola for the blend, went on sale exclusively at Smokingpipes.com.

TPE 2024 takes place Jan. 31-Feb. 2 in Las Vegas.