Taru Martani

Java and Sumatra have supplied since the nineteenth century tobaccos that Europe used on a massive scale: the Sumatra wrapper dressed generations of Dutch, German and Belgian cigars. Yet Indonesia, in the imagination of the cigar, remains a supplier — not a country of houses.

Taru Martani corrects that. Founded in 1918 by the Dutchman N.V. Negresco and settled in Yogyakarta three years later, the factory changed hands with the occupations — Dutch, then Japanese — before returning to Indonesia in 1949.

It was then that Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX gave it its present name: Taru Martani, "the leaf that gives life" in Javanese. The name itself tells of a country taking hold of its own, and it is hard to find elsewhere a cigar whose very appellation states an independence so plainly.

The house, the oldest in the country, still rolls most of its output by hand and exports to Europe and Asia. It is today the only Indonesian house in this atlas: the country's two other entries carried Dutch machine-made brands, and the machine-made cigar has no place here.

Range Depth

• Taru Martani Senator

  Wrapper Java · Strength Medium

  Java tobacco rolled in Java. An earthy, lightly spiced register with a frank burn — a profile European blends use only as a component, never on its own.

  Corona

• Taru Martani Panter

  Wrapper Sumatra · Strength Light

  Sumatra wrapper, short format: exactly what Europe imported by the million last century, but made in the country the leaf comes from.

  Petit Corona

🥃 Pairings

• Java tea

  Other

  The local pairing, and the most coherent with a tobacco grown on the same volcanic slopes.

• Sumatra coffee

  Coffee

  Full-bodied and earthy, it joins the register of the Javanese tobacco without contradicting it.