The Griffin's

The Griffin's owes its name to a Geneva nightclub, which is probably the most improbable origin in the catalogue. Bernard Grobet opened the club in 1964 and received an international clientele there; twenty years later he wanted a cigar to offer at his tables and had it made for him in the Dominican Republic. The first Griffin's came out in 1984, intended for the club alone.

It pleased well beyond any intention. The cigar soon turned up in Swiss tobacconists, then in the United States from 1989. Grobet then approached the Davidoff organisation to handle exports, and sold it the brand three years later — so the Swiss house entered the story afterwards, and not at the creation as is sometimes written.

The result bears the mark of the man who commissioned it: a drawing-room cigar, elegant, without rough edges, meant to accompany a conversation rather than dominate it. Pale wrapper, mild-to-medium register, notes of cedar, hazelnut and white flowers.

It is, in this atlas, one of the rare cigars whose birth certificate is an evening rather than a plantation.

Range Depth

• Griffin's Classic

  Wrapper Connecticut Shade · Strength Light-Medium

  Cedar, hazelnut, white flowers. A drawing-room cigar, meant to accompany a conversation rather than dominate it — the spirit of the Geneva nightclub whose name it carries.

  Corona · Robusto

• Griffin's Perfecto

  Wrapper Connecticut Shade · Strength Medium

  A tapered format the market has largely abandoned, kept here out of consistency with the original spirit.

  Perfecto

🥃 Pairings

• Vintage champagne

  Wine

  The pairing its founder served: it is for that table that the cigar was composed.

• Light filter coffee

  Coffee

  The hazelnut of the cigar calls for a coffee that does not crush it.