I am only 3 months into this cigar smoking hobby/obsession. I want to raise some concerns as regards cigar ratings, and would be interested in what you and your readers think about it.
(1) I’m concerned that these ratings affect sales a lot more than they should. It seems the ratings have too much influence.
(2) I’m concerned that the advertisers and cigar retailers misrepresent the ratings of a given cigar by referring to a rating that is so old that no one knows what has happened to the quality in the subsequent years.
(3) I’m concerned that some retailers imply a cigar has a high rating when it was another size entirely that received the high rating, and not the one they are talking about.
(4) I’m concerned that most of the cigars being offered have ratings that are older than 2-3 years, and are suspect.
(5) Is it good for the industry that one publication in particular has so much influence?

The wine industry has 2 separate competing catalog-length ratings publications* that rate many thousands of wines, but we’re lucky if a cigar is rated once every 5 or 10 years. I’m not talking about the very small subset of the most popular premium cigars that are rated every few years.

There are very few current comparable cigar publications. Most of the cigar books date from the 1990′s, and there are no current comprehensive annual publications that rate cigars. By comprehensive I mean covering say 5000 current cigars, and by current I mean published either every year, or every other year.

This leaves us cigar smokers in the dark. We have no current comprehensive authoritative set of publications to guide us.

What do you and your readers feel about the concerns I have raised? (If this is not the best forum to use to raise these questions, what forums do you recommend?)

Yours truly,
Jeff Cohen

*Wine Enthusiast Essential Buying Guide (Annual) (lists 50,000 wines – most are rated)
Wine Spectator’s Ultimate Guide to Buying Wine (published every other year with ratings for 10,000 plus wines)
Wine Report (annual – 432 pages – number of wines reviewed not known)
There are many other authors that publish every few years on a smaller number of wines, for example Parker’s Wine Buying Guide, Hugh Johnsons Pocket Wine Buying Book

See whadda newb I am: I’ve never even noticed!

I have to take exception to statements like that; they leave cigar bloggers sounding more like 9-11 truthers than anything else. I should not have to point out that 2 of the top 10 cigars chosen for 2009 were Cuban. And how much advertising revenue do Cuban manufacturers send to CA? That’s a big fat $0. Padron was chosen as number 1; not a huge advertiser, either, if you count the number of ad pages sold to any particular company. Ditto with Oliva and EO (makers of the 601). Ashton is one of the largest advertisers and they came in 9th place.

I don’t understand why people can’t just take the CA reviews as just someone’s opinion just like every other review, whether it be in some other magazine or online? I personally am a big fan of the RP Decade and haven’t had an experience with construction like you did. But I won’t accuse you of biasing your review because Rocky wouldn’t advertise with you. Conversely, looking at the list of cigars on the right, I could accuse you of being in the tank for CAO because they advertise with you…after all every one of their sticks is rated an 89 or higher. But, I won’t accuse you of that because I want to inherently trust people.

Now, regarding CA’s reviews and ratings, I have detected a correlation between what cigar get reviewed and who advertises. I studied the whole ads vs. ratings issue over a couple months and found no correlation between number of pages bought and overall rating, but did notice that is is rare for them to review a cigar when the company making them does not advertise (with the exception of Cuban sticks). If you want to see a real conflict of interest in the cigar publication world, I invite you to check out “Cigar Magazine” sometime. On the surface, most people would like them better than CA because they tend to focus on cigars more, with plenty of related articles and reviews. But then you hear that they are owned by the same company that owns Altadis and you have to take a step back. Even if they tried for independent thought, it would be impossible to ever trust them.