Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust Polpetta Going Full Production

Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust has announced that its Polpetta cigar will no longer be used for events and instead will be offered as a regular production item that can be purchased.

Polpetta is a 4 x 48 mixed filler cigar, meaning it has a wrapper and binder like a typical cigar, but the filler is smaller cuts of cigars instead of the longfillers that are used for a typical cigar. In this case, the filler incorporates the cuts from three of the company’s other cigar lines into its filler, specifically Mi Querida, Mi Querida Triqui Traca and Umbagog. A Mexican San Andrés binder and Connecticut broadleaf wrapper round out the blend, and the cigars will continue to be produced at the Nicaragua American Cigars S.A. (NACSA) factory in Nicaragua.

Polpetta will have an MSRP of $7.30 each, with 25-count boxes priced at $182.50. It will be made available to all of Dunbarton’s retail accounts during the 2023 PCA Convention & Trade Show next month. The cigars are scheduled to begin shipping to stores in August.

“Polpetta is not a traditional sandwich cigar – (it) has a specific, consistent blend,” said Steve Saka, founder of Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust, in an email to halfwheel. “In addition to the table cuts, we also incorporate some long leaf filler tripa – so it is a far better grade and hybrid style of making this type of cigar. It is an improvement of the process I pioneered many years ago.”

Dunbarton began offering the Polpetta—which gets its name from the Italian word for meatball—at events beginning in February 2020. In April, the company announced it would use a new cigar for events: the Mi Querida Green PataPerro, an 8 1/2 x 52 parejo packaged in a two-count coffin.

The 2023 PCA Convention & Trade Show takes place July 8-11 in Las Vegas.