RoMa Craft Adding Maestranza as U.S. Exclusive

The next core line for RoMa Craft Tobac will be Maestranza.

Skip Martin, co-founder of RoMa Craft Tobac, has begun teasing the new release on social media. It’s a regular production line that will use a Mexican San Andrés wrapper—which Martin describes as Spanish Market Selection—over a Brazilian binder and fillers from the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

It will be offered in three regular production sizes, though the first release of the blend will be a limited edition size under the company’s CRAFT Maquette Series of cigars, which is a collection of various blends that are released in limited quantities in craft paper bundles.

That first size will be CRAFT Maquette La Maestranza, a box-pressed 4 1/4 x 56 petit gordo. It will have an MSRP of $12 per cigar and be sold in bundles of 10.

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 told halfwheel that he expects the CRAFT Maquette La Maestranza to ship in the summer, while the core sizes will ship in the fall.

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.”

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.

It serves as the counterpart of sorts to Wunder|Lust, a RoMa Craft cigar that is sold only in markets outside of the U.S. Like Wunder|Lust, Maestranza will come in a 40-count box, with two bundles of 20 cigars.