Casdagli

Casdagli is a British house that owns no fields. Jeremy Casdagli founded it in 1997 under the name Bespoke Cigars; it took its founder's name in the spring of 2018. That change says something about its purpose: it accepts being a signature rather than a manufactory, and works in short series rather than a permanent catalogue.

Its cigars have changed country three times. They were first rolled in Cuba, by a single torcedor, Carlos Valdez Mosquera, until he stepped back in 2013. Production then moved to Hendrik Kelner Jr.'s Kelner Boutique Factory in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. Today it is Costa Rican and split between two workshops: IGM, in San José, for Daughters of the Wind and Cypher 3311; Tabacos de Costa Rica, in Puriscal, for the Villa Casdagli line, under master blender Olman Guzmán.

That second address is not just any address, and it corrects what this entry used to claim. Tabacos de Costa Rica S.A. is, by the house's own account, the workshop "then known as Vegas Santiago" — that of Vegas de Santiago, which has its own entry in this atlas and whose house writes that it has grown tobacco at Puriscal for more than eighty years (above eleven hundred metres, says Zechbauer). La Nación wrote in 2011, however, that tobacco production there had ceased in 1997-1998: Casdagli has its Villa Casdagli rolled at Puriscal, whatever the state of the surrounding fields.

What remains true is that the leaf comes from elsewhere. The Villa Casdagli blends tobaccos from Peru, Nicaragua, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic under an Ecuadorian wrapper and binder; four of them undergo a second fermentation, called mejorado, of two to four months. Jeremy Casdagli says it was in this workshop, in 2012, that he discovered the Peruvian tobacco that became his favourite for blending. The country of production was indeed chosen for the workshop — but for what that workshop knows how to do.

The house belongs to the so-called boutique category: those whose annual output is counted in tens of thousands of cigars where the large houses count tens of millions. It is a difference of scale before it is a difference of quality, and it explains the essentials — irregular availability, no wide distribution network, and a reputation that circulates mainly among enthusiasts.

Range Depth

• Villa Casdagli

  Wrapper Undisclosed blend · Strength Medium-Full

  The range that carries the house name. The blend is kept confidential, as is often the case with houses of this size — discretion about origins is a choice, not an oversight.

• Daughters of the Wind

  Wrapper Undisclosed blend · Strength Medium

  The name comes from the way air-cured leaves are spoken of. A more restrained register than the Villa Casdagli.

• Cigarrus Basilica

  Wrapper Undisclosed blend · Strength Medium-Full

  A short run, produced in batches. It is the edition format that defines this range more than its profile does.

🥃 Pairings

• Unpeated malt whisky

  Spirits

  A house that works in restraint sits badly with a demonstrative spirit. A malt without peat leaves room.

• Costa Rican coffee

  Coffee

  A pairing of place rather than terroir: the cigar is not Costa Rican by its leaf, it is Costa Rican by its workshop — the coffee really is.