An unranked editorial retrospective of lines available by 2018, informed by manufacturer accounts. These selections are not historical award results or firsthand tasting notes from cigars produced that year.
Joya de Nicaragua marks fifty years with Cinco Décadas and offers a contrasting contemporary expression in Silver. E.P. Carrillo’s Encore opens another chapter through an all-Nicaraguan blend made in the Dominican Republic. Our picks for the best cigars of 2018 explore that capacity for an established maker to move in several directions. Anniversaries sit beside different wrappers, cask treatments and shaped cigars, giving the year a sense of experience still finding fresh uses.
E.P. Carrillo Encore
Encore brings an all-Nicaraguan tobacco blend to E.P. Carrillo’s Dominican manufacturing. The composition distinguishes it clearly from La Historia within the same family’s work. One country supplies the leaf and another the factory, giving the line a precise story of materials assembled through an established making tradition.
Joya de Nicaragua Cinco Décadas
Cinco Décadas arrived in 2018 to celebrate Joya de Nicaragua’s fifty years of cigar making. The original release gives the anniversary a direct place in the humidor. Half a century of company history supplies the occasion, while the new line turns that accumulated experience toward a particular commemorative expression.
Joya Silver
Silver takes Joya in another direction during its anniversary year. A pressed presentation and multinational blend give the line a contemporary counterpart to Cinco Décadas. The pairing reveals a maker able to honor its history while continuing to develop different ideas about composition and form.
My Father La Opulencia
La Opulencia combines Mexican Rosado Oscuro wrapper with Nicaraguan binder and filler beneath a pressed shape. My Father’s historical artwork gives the cigar an older visual setting. The blend remains a modern expression, joining that atmosphere to specific leaves and construction within the Garcia family’s range.
Plasencia Alma del Campo
Alma del Campo offers Plasencia’s more measured Nicaraguan expression, grounded in the family’s growing experience. Beside Encore, it shares a national tobacco origin while coming from a different production story. Its place in the range shows the family using that experience to pursue a distinct balance of blending aims.
Davidoff Winston Churchill The Late Hour
Scotch-cask-aged Nicaraguan tobacco gives The Late Hour a production detail as memorable as its name. Introduced in 2017, the line brings another treatment to Davidoff’s Winston Churchill family. The additional preparation gives this expression a particular premise, carried forward into the year beside more conventional anniversary and family themes.
Undercrown Shade
Undercrown Shade combines a gentler direction with Ecuadorian Connecticut wrapper. Drew Estate’s factory-team origin story remains part of the family, adding a different human perspective to a year of institutional milestones. This expression gives the selection more range through a deliberate change in the kind of profile the maker pursues.
E.P. Carrillo La Historia
La Historia surrounds Nicaraguan filler with Ecuadorian binder and Mexican wrapper, bringing the composition together in the Dominican Republic. Its family story and artwork give the Carrillo line a personal setting. Beside Encore’s all-Nicaraguan leaves, the recipe makes the breadth of one manufacturing family’s work particularly clear.
La Flor Dominicana Andalusian Bull
Andalusian Bull brings a substantial figurado to the year’s pressed and straight-sided company. Ecuadorian Corojo wrapper and Dominican estate tobaccos connect the shape to La Flor Dominicana’s agricultural work. The silhouette gives craftsmanship a prominent place in the selection, with a changing form that asks careful control of the roller.
Davidoff Winston Churchill The Original Series
The generation of Winston Churchill relaunched in 2015 provides the Original Series in this comparison. It gives The Late Hour a family context while retaining a separate blend story. The pairing helps show how one theme can support different cigars as Davidoff develops the range through successive expressions.
Looking back at 2018
Experience creates room for variation in 2018. Joya celebrates a half-century while developing Silver, and Carrillo works with markedly different recipes through the same Dominican manufacturing tradition. The year’s most revealing pairings sit within the portfolios, where a familiar maker finds another way to work with tobacco.
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