The Limited Cigar Association has dropped their April release video featuring blends from AJ Fernandez and Eric Espinosa. The LCA was created to support brick and mortar shops across the county by making exclusive releases available on the first Friday of every month. Use their store locator to find out where the nearest LCA shop is, and happy hunting!
The featured cigar for April is the a special project named Year Of The Wabbit, which showcases tobaccos from four different countries. Aged for over a year before arriving at your local LCA, these cigars were rolled at the experimental factory that A.J. Fernandez established for Privada projects – Tabacalera Annex. Interested in putting the Privada spin on the luxury Chinese Zodiac inspired blends that have become more and more popular over the past few years, the cigar culture brand hesitated at first due to the sheer volume of similar releases on the market.
With 2023 being the Chinese zodiac’s Year of The Rabbit, and April’s first Friday falling on the start of Easter weekend, Privada realized that the opportunity they were looking for had finally presented itself. Since it wouldn’t be the Year of The Rabbit again for another dozen years, now was the time. With collectible packaging created specifically to rise to the level of the cigar it holds, this is the kind of project that Privada hopes to be judged by.
April’s LCA+ offering is a perfect example of what many cigar heads love about the craft and the products that are created as a result. Across the cigar industry, blends are often worked and reworked multiple times before being finalized for production. While enthusiasts get to experience the culmination of those efforts in the form of the cigars that we buy, it’s exceedingly rare that we get to enjoy the variations that blenders are constantly testing.
The Blood Orange from Erik Espinosa is one such opportunity. A variant of the popular La Laranja blend, the Blood Orange has been resting for 4 years in Espinosa’s aging rooms. At the time they were rolled, the cigar maker was looking for alternatives to La Laranja’s Brazilian wrapper leaf because it was becoming more difficult to source. Just a few thousand cigars were rolled using the wrapper leaf with the closest characteristics they could find. which means that the best part about them is also the worst – once they’re gone, they’re gone!