Juan Clemente

Juan Clemente is recognisable by an oddity nobody else has dared: its band is not placed near the head, but at the FOOT of the cigar, at the end you light.

This is no affectation. The foot is the most fragile part of a cigar: the wrapper is loose there, and the slightest knock splits it. The band, placed at that end, holds it until lighting and then comes away by itself. It is a maker's solution, adopted out of an obsession with construction — and it became a signature you can spot from ten metres.

Its founder, Jean Clément, was French. He created the house in Santiago de los Caballeros in 1982 and hispanicised his own name, judging that it would sound better that way in this trade. A French origin at that moment is one more anomaly: the country was rising and almost every new brand came from exiled Cuban families.

The profile is mild to medium, in the classic Dominican tradition: cedar, hay, a discreet mildness, and often slender formats. Production has stayed confidential, and the brand belongs to that category of houses one speaks of in the past tense without their ever having quite disappeared.

Range Depth

• Club Selection

  Wrapper Connecticut Shade · Strength Light-Medium

  Cedar, hay, a discreet mildness. And the band at the FOOT of the cigar, at the end you light: a signature you spot from ten metres and that nobody else has dared.

  Corona

• Rothschild

  Wrapper Connecticut Shade · Strength Medium

  The short format of the house, in the classic Dominican tradition — balance, suppleness, no demonstration.

  Robusto

🥃 Pairings

• Central American filter coffee

  Coffee

  A pale coffee, to the measure of a cigar that never raises its voice.

• VSOP cognac

  Spirits

  The fruit of the cognac extends the cedar without covering it.