Siglo de Oro

Siglo de Oro is a cigar factory in Moscow — the sentence is enough to say why the entry exists. Artur Shilyaev, who had run a construction company and, his partner says, was born with a cigar in his mouth, opened it in 2011 with Andrey Ivanov. Five to six rollers work there, all from Cuba and Nicaragua; Shilyaev himself goes to buy the tobacco in Cuba, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and composes the house's five lines and thirty-three vitolas. A large cellar keeps the cigars at least four months, and longer if he judges them too young.

Production runs around three hundred and fifty thousand cigars a year, sold only in Russia — a market that smoked about two and a half million cigars in 2020. The brands tell the country: Evgeny Onegin, Pushkin's hero, first; Siglo de Oro, Pelo de Oro and Hidalgo in Spanish; Chortova Dyuzhina, the devil's dozen. This atlas opens Russia as a rolling place for this house and for Pogar, without fields or variety: all the tobacco comes from elsewhere.

The English-language trade press ignores it; the Russian cigar press has followed it for ten years, and that is what the entry cites.

Range Depth

• Evgueni Onéguine

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium-Full

  Pushkin's hero on a band — the factory's lead line.

• Siglo de Oro

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium

  The golden century, in Spanish, on a Moscow cigar.