America's #1 Online Cigar Auction
first, best, biggest!

You should ask muhren for a list.....

Well maybe some of the bigger players will do something like that.
But still, it is going to be very costly and time consuming to bring out any "new" stuff, because of all the regulatory BS.
It will be just as costly (if I understand it correctly) to get approval for existing products that fall outside of the "grand fathered" date..
There has to be a list of sorts..........somewhere.

Guess we all just need to hope that hand-made premiums somehow get an exemption eventually.

Older lines...that is.
Q

Early 2007 IIRC.

But this begs the question, how do you define how to exempt? By line name, by vitola, by blend? And what about cigars that were in production for years before that, but say that particular vitola was dropped in 2006? Can they just bring that size back because the line is still alive? Or what about defunct lines? How about lines the changed hands / owners, what if they were acquired after 2007 and are still being produced, if even only just in name?

How about those Cuban cigars that we are now allowed to bring back from travel abroad?

It's a big poorly thought out mess.

...and are there still supplies of the tobacco used then? If hand made cigars are going to be regulated, I am glad that there are exemptions. However, given the variations in tobacco crops from year to year, I doubt that, say, a pre-2007 Padron 4000 can be replicated, even if they use the same 'blend."

If there will be fewer small cigar makers who now buy up a lot of premium leaves to make boutique blends, wouldn't that increase the supply of premium tobaccos with fewer potential buyers? Would those with exemptions buy and use those tobacco leaves in their exempted products, resulting in better cigars?

That's exactly why I brought up blend. It changes all the time. Hell, the variety of tobacco used can change, look at the blight & blue mold issues that have wiped out various strains of tobacco along the way. Some of the tobacco strains grown in the early 2000's don't even exist anymore. Yet the cigars persist with new strains, sometimes of different varietals.

Padron probably could replicate the cigars exactly. I doubt anyone other than them could achieve that feat, but yeah, they probably could, all the way down to the harvest date. They have so much tobacco stashed all over Esteli and the outlying areas, it's nuts. Of course if they did that, Jeorge would call it the "Umpity-dumpity Anniversary" and charge $50/stick for it. And proceed to sell out all inventory in minutes.

It is a little confusing because I was under the impression that pre 2008 cigars were the exempt ones but for some reason manufacturers were at a race to release any lines they could before August something(8th ?) of last summer to have the line make some sort of cutoff date. Some of the lines were even released despite not being close to ready and are now not available because they are working out the kinks of the line. All in all it feels like there are a lot of things unanswered with this FDA mess. One thing I do understand is that the smaller boutique manufacturers will not exist anymore because they won't be able to afford the cost of regulations and be profitable unless they price themselves out of the market.