Serenading History

The big draw of the Romeo y Julieta is not just limited to the inference of a Shakespearean romance but a true love affair for those who never let the flame go out.

- SHANKER GANGADHAR

Hundreds of years ago, when the classical age of tobacco was flowering, cigars had whimsical names. The most recherché one is Shakespearean: Romeo y Julieta, founded in 1875 and made legendary by billionaire aristocrat José Rodriguez Fernández aka Don Pepin. Feeling the thick, firm texture of the brand’s tobacco leaves plucked from the Vuelta Abajo area—Cuban tobacco’s Garden of Eden where temptation is worshipped than cursed— is touching the grain of history and literature. Smoking a Romeo y Julieta Churcills, a Mille Fleurs, a number 3, or a Petitt Julieta; savouring their nutty, floral, herbal and woody flavours is serenading a legend on the terazza of legacy. The cigars were Winston Churchill’s favourites, and the marquee honours its celebrated fanboy with eponymous, AÑejados, Petit, and Wide versions. The seven-inch long cigar with 47ring gauge befits the hero’s stature—or oratory. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s line “That is the noblest Roman of them all,” would be “a Romeo y Julieta is the noblest cigar of them all.” In fact when Churchill was on a trans-Atlantic journey on the RMS Queen Mary, he gifted a pair of Romeo y Julietas to a naval officer, who kept them safely. In August, his descendants sold them for $5,500 at an auction.