RoMa Craft Tobac Announces CRAFT Maquette Series
RoMa Craft Tobac has a new series that aims to let consumers get a unique peak inside of its blending process. It’s called CRAFT Maquette, a reference to scale models that are used in sculpture.
Rather than producing miniature versions of its cigars, RoMa Craft aims to use Maquette to let consumers taste the progress of a blend at a specific point.
The first of theses releases is called Il Nonno, a 5 x 52 robusto that uses a Hibrido wrapper from Jalapa, Nicaragua over a mata fina binder from Brazil, a Dominican criollo 98 base leaf and three fillers: Brazilian mata norte Recôncavo viso, corojo 99 ligero from the Dominican Republic and criollo viso from Pueblo Nuevo, Nicaragua.
The MSRP is set at $15 and production is limited to 125 packs of 10 cigars. It will only be an exclusive for Riverside Cigar Shop of Jeffersonville, Ind. and will go on sale in mid-September.
Skip Martin, co-founder of RoMa Craft Tobac, described the intent for the series:
A maquette, also known as a bozzetto, is an object made as a preparatory study for a full-scale project.
Artists use maquettes to explore shapes and figural poses of sculptures.
Architects use maquettes as an essential part of the iterative design process, developing ideas from a sketch into a physical object, to inform decisions involving materials, space and form without consuming the time and resources larger scale proofs require.
The use of maquettes to realize a concept allows the creator to evaluate and develop those ideas more efficiently.
In many ways, blending samples serve the same purpose for a cigar maker.
As a new cigar blend evolves from an idea into large scale production core line it goes through many iterations.
Individual tobaccos are selected, purchased and sampled. They are evaluated and classified based on flavor, aroma, combustion and other physical characteristics.
These tobaccos are blended with other tobaccos and, once again, the combined tobaccos are evaluated to determine how these individual tobaccos perform together. Once a blend concept is realized it is produced in small quantities and allowed to dry in an aging room.
Many times, as humidity and fermentation variances inherent in the cigar making process begin to normalize and the tobaccos begin to marry, new flavors, aromas and other attributes develop in the blend. Sometimes this brings the resulting blend closer to the intention of the maker, sometimes it sets them off onto a new path.
Craft maquette represents an exploration of that practice. Small batch releases with new and unique tobaccos blended and aged for you to join us in our blend evaluation and discovery process.
Il Nonno is Italian for grandpa. Martin created the cigar to celebrate the birth of his first grandchild. The child’s parents are Martin’s daughter and the son of Jeff Mouttet, owner of Riverside Cigar Shop.
Martin told halfwheel that he plans to release 5-10 CRAFT Maquette cigars per year, though future releases could be larger in production numbers.
Charlie Minato
I am an editor and co-founder of halfwheel.com/Rueda Media, LLC. I previously co-founded and published TheCigarFeed, one of the two predecessors of halfwheel. I have written about the cigar industry for more than a decade, covering everything from product launches to regulation to M&A. In addition, I handle a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff here at halfwheel. I enjoy playing tennis, watching boxing, falling asleep to the Le Mans 24, wearing sweatshirts year-round and eating gyros. echte liebe.
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