CRAFT Maquette La Maestranza Debuting Next Week

RoMa Craft Tobac’s new Maestranza line will go on sale for the first time next week.

While Maestranza will be a regular production line, the company is previewing it with a limited edition size known as CRAFT Maquette La Maestranza, a 4 1/2 x 56 petit gordo. The Maquette version and the three regular production vitolas use the same blend: a Mexican San Andrés wrapper over a Brazilian binder and fillers from the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua. In a post on Instagram, Skip Martin—co-founder of RoMa Craft Tobac—said that the wrapper is a version of tobacco that the company uses for its Neanderthal line, but lighter in color.

CRAFT Maquette La Maestranza has an MSRP of $12.50—it was originally announced as $12—and is limited to 800 bundles of 10 cigars. The first of those bundles will debut on Friday, July 19, at an event at Cigar Den in East Brunswick, N.J. Subsequent events will take place and non-event shipments will go to retailers in August.

Martin says the CRAFT Maquette cigars have been aged for almost one year.

The three regular production sizes will be:

• Maestranza Ciutadella Catalonia (4 x 50) — $9 (Box of 40, $360)
• Maestranza Castillito Murcia (5 x 60) — $11 (Box of 40, $440)
• Maestranza Caballería Valencia (6 x 52) — $10 (Box of 40, $400)

Martin said those are scheduled for Q4 2024.

In that same post, Martin said he considers this cigar to have a Spanish Market Selection wrapper:

The rosado maduro hue reminded me of cigars I enjoyed in my youth before dark cigars were popularized that were generally referred to as Spanish Market Selection (SMS). Having a good American Market Selection (AMS) cigar and a few English Market Selection (EMS) cigars in our portfolio, it felt right to close it out with the addition of an SMS…and so the Maestranza blend was developed, produced and aged for almost a year.

As for the name, it’s inspired by the people who have helped get RoMa Craft Tobac and the associated Nica Sueño factory to where they are today, with a nod to “Chef’s Table.”

Previously, Martin explained it on social media:

I considered a cigar in 2015 called La Maestranza de Barrio Oscar Benevides for CRAFT 2015. We had finished building Nica Sueño in our new neighborhood, and I wanted to mark the milestone of all of the work it took to get from our humble beginnings to that point.

In an early episode of Chef’s Table (Season 1, Episode 3) Francis Mallmann uses the word ‘maestranza’ defining it as ‘the people who are around you helping’. It had resonated with me ever since.

I’m very excited to get this one out there and hope whatever success it achieves stands to honor all of the people who are, and have been, around me helping me to execute and realize the vision that was/is RoMa Craft Tobac and Nica Sueño.

As the saying goes: No great thing was ever done by a single person. So it can also be said that no cigar is the result of the work of a single master. This project as with all of the thousand other little things we do every day are, as always, the result of the hard work and dedication of dozens of people, hundreds of pairs of hands on the oars moving them forward.

Of note, due to trademark issues, the cigar will only be sold in the U.S.

Update — The event is July 19, not July 12.