Aging Room La Bohéme Heads To Retail
It’s an opening night of sorts for this opera-themed cigar and a busy day at the Altadis U.S.A. warehouse. First shipments of the new Aging Room La Bohéme are leaving the company’s Florida facility and heading to retailers across the country. The brand is owned by Rafael Nodal, vice president of product capability for Altadis, which distributes the brand.
La Bohéme Tabacalera Palma with a blend of mostly Dominican tobacco. Eventually, Nodal retired the line. More than a decade later, a few things have changed. Nodal now works for Altadis creating blends, developing cigar brands and acting as a liaison between cigar factories and Altadis’ corporate executives. Bringing back La Bohéme is his latest project. Conductors often re-arrange canonized musical compositions to suit modern audiences and that’s exactly what Nodal has done with La Bohéme.
The brand is currently made in Nicaragua by A.J. Fernandez—a longtime collaborator with Nodal—and is sold under Aging Room banner. And it’s an entirely new, stronger blend, all Nicaraguan save for the wrapper, which is a hybrid of broadleaf and Habano seed grown in Connecticut. This is the first time using this wrapper for both Altadis and Nodal.
The Aging Room La Bohéme comes in the same four sizes as the previous La Bohéme brand: Mimi, measuring 3 1/2 inches long by 46 ring gauge ($17.90); Pittore (5 1/8 by 52, $23.92); Poeta (5 3/4 by 54, $24.52) and Musico (6 1/4 by 60, $24.90). The cigars are packaged in 20-count boxes and adorned with vintage, pre-Revolution bands similar to the original release.
“The original La Bohéme was introduced in 2014 as a tribute to the cigars my grandfather smoked in the small park near our home in Cuba,” Nodal said last year when news of this brand was first announced. “The new Aging Room La Bohéme is a look to the future, featuring bolder flavors and unique tobaccos. It represents three of my ions: music, cigars and Cuba.”
For a vertical brand tasting of the Aging Room La Bohéme, see a future issue of Cigar Insider.
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