A Word on Our “2016” List

In a few hours, halfwheel’s list of the top 25 cigars for 2016 will be published.

I’ve spent the last few months trying to figure out how to explain the following, and even more time about how we as a site should execute our plan. It’s not clear cut, it was in one way or another out of our control and I don’t think it’s our fault. But there’s an issue with our list, at least in the context of prior years, and I think disclosure is warranted.

Our list has always been about finding the 25 best cigars that we reviewed and that debuted in a particular year. It’s not “what’s smoking well” or “the best regular production non-Cuban new cigar of the year.” It’s the best cigars that we’ve reviewed from a particular year—or so it was.

Neither halfwheel, nor any other publication reviews every cigar that comes out in a given year. No one comes close. For a few years we basically didn’t review regular production cigars, but whatever the case was, we generally have had a list that is fairly representative of the year.

Not so much in 2016 and definitely not in 2017.

Because of the regulations introduced by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) last year, there were a lot more cigars released in 2016. This site took a policy that we would not review anything unless it had been formally released. That meant no reviews of phantom brands, cigars that were shipped to a limited amount of retailers prior to Aug. 8, 2016 with the sole purpose of meeting the deadline of when cigars would be required to get pre-approval before being released. But even that didn’t matter when it comes to how many cigars we didn’t review in 2016.

Even before the FDA regulations were announced, there were indications that 2016 was going to have more cigars than 2015—a year that probably had slightly fewer cigars than 2014—but once the regulations were announced certain companies decided to release dozens more cigars than normal. As I’ve mentioned before, the problem of the amount of new cigars is a vicious cycle that is compounded by the increasing amount of cigar companies and the fact that established companies have portfolios that are oftentimes double to triple the size they were five years ago.

This all means that we reviewed a significantly less percentage of the market in 2016 than we’ve done in prior years.

Because of this, our staff voted in favor of focusing on cigars that were released prior to Oct. 1, 2016. That doesn’t mean there aren’t cigars that were released after Oct. 1 on our list, there certainly were some of those cigars reviewed, but it does mean that we prioritized the ones beforehand. We tried to make some sense for 2016 and as much as we can for 2017. We decided that it would be better to have a cigar that came out in November 2016 on our 2017 list than what that came out in February. We also decided that it was only fair to have the 2017 list be a bit more liberal for cigars that came out in the latter parts of 2016, otherwise those cigars would be punished simply because there weren’t enough days in the year.

Our top 25 list for 2016 is less complete than it was years in past. Our list for 2017 will certainly include cigars that were released in 2016—from a legal perspective it’s likely that most cigars on the 2017 list will in fact be cigars that were released in 2016—and we are going to live with it. Perhaps we will publish the average scores from both the 2016 and 2017 lists so people can see how the 2016 winner compares to the 2017, who knows.

However, for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel particularly confident saying our list is a good attempt at the top 25 cigars released in a particular year. I know there are good cigars we didn’t get to, probably dozens of them. The good news is, we have 50 weeks of 2017 to rectify that.

I am unsure what the long-term future of the top 25 list—or really any of our awards—is. A world where new cigars are not allowed in the U.S., the largest market in the world, certainly makes things interesting. For the time being, there seems to be companies announcing cigars they previously have not discussed and there’s certainly months worth of 2016 cigars that we need to review. As I wrote in May about the broad regulations, the industry will move on, adjust and find a new normal and like everything else, top 25 awards will be part of that process.

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On a different note.

We followed the same approach we introduced last year. Any cigar that debuted from Dec. 1, 2015-Dec. 31, 2016 was eligible if it scored 91 points or higher. After that, we purchased additional cigars which were given to each of the other three reviewers on the site. Each reviewer smoked and scored the cigars and then we combined all scores.

In total, there were 37 cigars that went through this process. Two cigars, the Romeo y Julieta Gran Reserva Churchills Gran Reserva Cosecha 2009 and the Cuaba 20, both Cuban, have still not been released. One cigar, the Montecristo 80 Aniversario, was released and purchased, but the cigars didn’t make it to the office on time thanks to some shipping difficulties, so it will be eligible for the 2017 list. The Romeo y Julieta and Cuaba will also be eligible for the 2017 list so long as they are released.

For those wondering about the numbers.

We reviewed 195 new cigars in 2016, they scored an average of 86.8. An additional 100 non-new cigars were scored in 2016, in total all 295 reviews produced an average of 87.04.

Average Scores by Year

• 2013 – 86.88
• 2014 – 86.91
• 2015 – 86.29
• 2016 – 87.04

Cuba led all counties with an average score of 89 points for new cigars. In a bit of surprise, at least to me, La Aurora led the way in terms of factory average with three new cigars from the factory scoring 90.3 points. As far as brands with a minimum of three cigars reviewed: Espinosa Premium Cigars led the way with an average of 90.67.

Our top 25 will be published at 1 p.m. central time today.