2024 YEAR IN REVIEW

WE ANALYZE A YEAR'S WORTH OF CIGAR RATINGS

- BY THOMAS PAPPALARDO

The year is still young and there are plenty of new cigars on the horizon, but before we look forward, it’s important to look back for a retrospective view of last year. CIGAR AFICIONADO and our twice-monthly digital newsletter, Cigar Insider, put hundreds of cigars through our blind tasting process in 2024—628 to be exact. Sifting through a year’s worth of ratings all by yourself can be a daunting task so we’ve done it for you with the aim of giving some context and broader meaning to all the data. We compiled the ratings, crunched the numbers and analyzed the scores of 2024 to bring you a concise picture of the cigar industry and how it performed.

Since late 2020, the premium cigar industry has experienced a period known as the “New Cigar Boom,” a pandemic-born upswing in the market—including import numbers exceeding 450 million cigars. Three years later, some expected the bubble to finally burst. It didn’t. The numbers for 2024 are not yet complete, but the most recent data provided by the Cigar Association of America (October 2024) showed impressive numbers with 362.8 million cigars imported over the 346.8 million for the same period in 2023, an increase of 4.6 percent. A significant portion is due to Dominican shipments rising from 82.9 million in October 2023 to 94.2 million cigars in 2024, a 13.6 percent increase. Nicaragua, the largest exporter overall, showed a small uptick of 3.5 percent.

Although a minor producer in the handmade cigar market, Costa Rica demonstrated remarkable robustness last year, more than doubling its exports from 1.1 million cigars in 2023 to 2.3 million last year. Honduras, a much-larger producer than Costa Rica, did show some slowing, dropping 6.7 percent to 54.7 million.