Graycliff

Graycliff is first a hotel and restaurant in Nassau, on a hill that watches the liners come into port, and its owner, Enrico Garzaroli, had been selling Havanas there for twenty years when he wanted his own. He brought in Avelino Lara — the former head of El Laguito, the man of the Cohiba — whose exit from Cuba he arranged in 1993, as a tourist first, then with permission to stay. Together they composed a blend of imported tobaccos: Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, sometimes Ecuador and Cameroon, under an Indonesian wrapper that Lara polished with bethune, a maceration of alcohol and spices of which Garzaroli discloses only one ingredient, Sauternes.

Production began in January 1997 with a single roller, seated in the restaurant's entrance — the house says so, and the trade press described the rolling table customers saw as they walked in. The cigars went to the United States in October 1997. The workshop, fifty paces from the restaurant, was staffed with retired Cuban rollers Garzaroli had brought over, average age sixty-four, four of them near eighty; he reported six hundred and fifty thousand cigars rolled in 1999. Lara retired in 2000; Enrico and his son Paolo have blended since, with sixteen rollers.

The Bahamas grow nothing: it is a rolling country, and this atlas opens it for this single house, as it opened Switzerland. It is here that La Palina, whose entry this atlas carries, was relaunched in 2010 before moving elsewhere.

Range Depth

• Graycliff

  Wrapper Indonesian · Strength Medium

  Avelino Lara's blend, 1997 — Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras under an Indonesian wrapper polished with bethune.

• Bahiba

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium-Full

  Bahamas and Cohiba, contracted — launched in August 2000, the founder says.