Principle Cigars

Principle is a collector's house. Darren Cioffi, of Long Island, spent years handling antique box labels and tobacco lithographs, and built a cigar library going back to the 1870s; he has smoked aged and pre-embargo examples. The brand he founded in 2013 — its motto dates it — was born of that mania: the cigar as a whole object, box, band, size and tobacco together.

He met Hendrik Kelner Jr., the son of Davidoff's tobacco master, who had just opened his own workshop in Santiago — Kelner Boutique Factory, whose entry this atlas carries. They spent a year and a half choosing aged tobaccos, and that is where everything is rolled, by four rollers, at ten cigars a day for the slowest sizes. Time To Burn, the tenth-anniversary project, in 2023, was the exception: it came out of Casa Carrillo.

The lines are eras: Aviator, American industrial art deco of the late 1940s; Accomplice, French style of the 1930s; Martinique, eighteenth-century colonial. A house that thinks its bands as prints — that is what the founder collected before producing.

Range Depth

• Aviator Series

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium

  American industrial art deco of the late 1940s — the founding line, five to seven aged tobaccos.

• Accomplice

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium

  French style of the 1930s — one blend across all vitolas, satin bands.

• Martinique

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium-Full

  Eighteenth-century colonial.