Cigar Aficionado Enters the Podcast Arena — And It's About Time
For more than three decades, Cigar Aficionado has defined the conversation around premium cigars in America. It placed the leaf on coffee tables next to bottles of single malt, positioned the cigar lounge as a legitimate cultural institution, and gave serious smokers a vocabulary — and a scoring system — they could argue over. Now, the brand that built its reputation in print is staking out new territory in audio and video. Cigar Aficionado magazine has joined the podcast world, with the new show now available and streaming across several platforms as both a traditional audio podcast and with a video component. It is, in the plainest terms, a long-overdue expansion — and based on the early episodes, the magazine's editorial team is bringing the same depth of knowledge that has sustained the brand through cigar booms, regulatory battles, and cultural shifts.
Who Is Driving the Show
Any podcast lives or dies by the credibility and chemistry of its hosts, and Cigar Aficionado has put its most seasoned voices behind the microphone. The podcast is hosted by executive editor David Savona. Savona is not a newcomer cycling through talking points — he has been embedded in the premium cigar world for the better part of thirty years. After writing a freelance piece in 1995 for Cigar Aficionado magazine, he was hired by M. Shanken Communications that summer as the senior editor of Cigar Insider, which launched in January 1996. Over the years his responsibilities grew, and in 2014 he was named executive editor. That kind of institutional tenure matters enormously in a niche this specific.
Savona has walked through tobacco fields in Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, Ecuador, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and even Connecticut, and has visited cigar factories around the world while spending time with virtually all the major players in the premium cigar world. That on-the-ground experience is the invisible infrastructure beneath every conversation the podcast will have — it means no question gets answered with a Wikipedia summary, and no claim gets made without firsthand context behind it.
Alongside Savona sits managing editor Greg Mottola, who brings his own formidable background to the table. Mottola is a true cigar boomer, having started smoking in 1996 at the peak of the cigar boom. During college, discretionary funds went toward midnight crossings over Niagara Falls into Canada from upstate New York to buy Cuban cigars. Somewhere between smuggling and smoking them, he acquired an English degree and went on to become a technical writer before an opportunity arose to work at Cigar Aficionado as a Tasting Coordinator. He got the job more on passion than lifestyle writing experience and went on to become Senior Editor, where he oversees and orchestrates the blind tasting process while managing the magazine's editorial cycles and reporting on the industry. The two hosts together represent roughly six decades of combined experience covering the cigar world at the highest level — and the early episodes suggest they know how to translate that expertise into compelling conversation.
The First Two Episodes: What's Already on the Table
Episode One: Pulling Back the Curtain on Blind Tastings
For any serious cigar smoker who has ever wondered how the hundred-point ratings in Cigar Aficionado actually get made, the debut episode goes straight to the heart of the matter. In the premiere episode, executive editor David Savona and managing editor Greg Mottola discuss the history and details of the magazine's blind tasting process. This is not trivial content. The ratings system is arguably the most influential quality metric in the entire premium cigar industry, and how those scores get assigned has long been a subject of curiosity — and occasional controversy — among enthusiasts and manufacturers alike.
The debut episode explains the magazine's blind tasting process of rating cigars, which has been in place since the magazine's inception in 1992. Tasters never know the identity of the cigars they review. That single commitment — total anonymity for every cigar on the table — is what separates the magazine's methodology from most informal reviews published elsewhere. It eliminates brand loyalty, price anchoring, and personal relationships with manufacturers from the equation. When a Liga Privada scores a 95 or a small-batch Nicaraguan puro from a lesser-known producer edges out a Cohiba, the numbers mean something, because no one at the tasting table knew which stick was which. Laying out how that system actually functions, and how it has been maintained without compromise for over thirty years, gives the podcast an immediate claim to authority that no newcomer to the cigar podcast space can match on day one.
Episode Two: Cuba — The Island That Never Leaves the Conversation
If the first episode was about the magazine's internal mechanics, the second revealed the show's ambition to engage with the world beyond the humidor. Episode No. 2, which covers current events in Cuba as well as the nation's famed cigars, went live on May 27. The Cuba episode is a natural fit for this team — no country carries more weight in the cigar world, and no country generates more complicated feelings among American smokers who have spent years buying Montecristos and Cohibas on foreign trips while the U.S. embargo kept those same cigars off domestic shelves.
In a conversation spanning a little more than 23 minutes, Savona sat down with managing editor Greg Mottola over Cuban cigars for a wide-ranging discussion about current events in Cuba, including the nation's protracted energy crisis and how some citizens have been demonstrating against the country's persistent blackouts, as well as the threats facing the country from the United States. That is a lot of ground to cover in under half an hour, and the editorial instinct to pair those geopolitical realities directly with a discussion of the Cuban cigar industry reflects the way this show is positioning itself — not as a simple product review show, but as a platform that treats cigar culture as inseparable from the broader forces that shape the world producing these things.
Cuba's energy crisis is not background noise. Rolling blackouts have disrupted production schedules at Habanos S.A., the state-owned company that controls the entire Cuban cigar export business. When the lights go out and humidity controls fail, tobacco aging and fermentation are affected in ways that ripple outward to every humidor on earth that houses Habanos products. Understanding the political and economic conditions in Cuba is, for a serious cigar smoker, a form of consumer education as much as it is geopolitics. The fact that the podcast addresses this head-on in only its second episode says something significant about what the editorial team thinks its audience deserves.
Episode Three: The $100 Cigar
The third episode tackles a subject that every serious smoker has an opinion about: the $100 cigar. As premium cigars have marched steadily upward in price over the past decade — driven by aged tobaccos, limited releases, and a luxury goods market that has rewarded exclusivity — the hundred-dollar stick has gone from novelty to a distinct product category. Whether that price point reflects genuine quality or sophisticated marketing is exactly the kind of question a publication with Cigar Aficionado's tasting infrastructure is uniquely positioned to answer.
Format, Frequency, and Availability
The podcast, which is free, will be updated twice a month. That cadence — two episodes per month — strikes a considered balance. It is frequent enough to maintain a consistent presence in a listener's feed without the pressure of weekly production cycles that can dilute quality over time. The decision to keep it free removes any barrier between the brand and its audience, which matters for a publication that has always derived much of its cultural power from the breadth of its readership rather than a narrow subscriber base.
The Cigar Aficionado Podcast is available and streaming across several platforms, as both a traditional audio podcast as well as with a video component. The dual-format strategy is shrewd. Audio serves the commuter, the man listening while driving through Atlanta traffic or running a weekend errand. The video component serves a different kind of engagement entirely — it allows viewers to watch two experienced cigar people actually smoking while they talk, which changes the register of the conversation in subtle but real ways. There is something fundamentally different about watching a knowledgeable editor hold a Robusto and discuss the Cuban tobacco crisis versus simply hearing his voice. The visual element grounds the conversation in the ritual that defines the hobby.
Why This Launch Matters for the Cigar Industry
A Trusted Voice Enters an Uneven Landscape
The cigar podcast space is already populated with a variety of shows, ranging from retail-floor conversations to enthusiast roundtables. Some are excellent; many are inconsistent; a handful have built genuine followings by committing to quality over years of production. What has been largely absent, until now, is a show backed by an editorial organization with the resources, the access, and the historical credibility to report on the industry at a genuinely journalistic level.
Cigar Aficionado has relationships that no independent podcast can replicate on its own. When Savona wants to sit down with the head of a major Honduran producer or get inside access to a Nicaraguan blending room, the magazine's name opens doors. When the editorial team wants to discuss the implications of U.S. trade policy on Habanos distribution, they have editors who have actually walked those tobacco fields and know the names, the families, and the decades of history behind the names on the band. That institutional depth gives the podcast an analytical foundation that conversation alone cannot build.
Geopolitics, Trade, and the Cigar
The timing of the podcast's launch is also not incidental. The premium cigar world is navigating a genuinely turbulent moment. Cuba's internal crisis is affecting production quality and supply chains for Habanos products globally. Meanwhile, the future of Cuba and issues facing the United States continue to dominate conversations among cigar enthusiasts with any interest in how their hobby intersects with foreign policy. The question of whether U.S. policy toward Cuba will shift — and what that would mean for the legal availability of Cuban cigars in American shops — has hung over the premium cigar world for decades and shows no signs of resolution.
Outside of Cuba, the broader cigar-producing world is also in motion. Honduras has been gaining significant ground on the Dominican Republic as a source of premium leaf and finished cigars. Nicaragua continues to produce some of the most lauded sticks in the world. New growing regions in Ecuador and Brazil are producing wrappers that have upended assumptions about which countries define the top tier. A podcast with access to the people driving these changes — and with editors knowledgeable enough to ask the right questions — can function as something close to a trade journal made accessible to a general enthusiast audience.
The Ratings System Demystified
Perhaps the most strategically intelligent move Cigar Aficionado has made with its podcast launch is leading with a full explanation of its ratings methodology. The magazine's scoring system is, in a very real sense, the product that matters most to its audience — more than any feature story or celebrity cover. When a cigar scores 93 or 97, it affects purchasing decisions across thousands of retail outlets. Manufacturers tailor their production strategies around it. Collectors build libraries around the top-rated sticks of a given year.
The magazine reviews the highest-scoring cigars from the past year and assembles a new tasting of only those cigars, repurchases, re-bands, and then re-smokes the cigars blind — tasters do not know the identity of the cigar. That second-round process, used to assemble the annual Top 25 list, is an additional layer of rigor that most enthusiasts are unaware of. By addressing this on the podcast, the editorial team is not just being transparent — they are reinforcing the credibility of every rating the magazine has ever published and will ever publish. In an era when consumers are rightly skeptical of paid placements and undisclosed relationships, that kind of editorial transparency is genuinely valuable.
The Magazine Behind the Mic
Understanding the podcast requires understanding the publication that created it. Cigar Aficionado is a magazine for the man who enjoys life's great pleasures — fine dining and entertaining, the finest wines and spirits, world travel and the arts. At the heart of every issue is the cigar: what to smoke, where to smoke, and how to enjoy a great smoke. That editorial formula has sustained the brand through the frenzy of the 1990s cigar boom, through the quieter years that followed, and through a sustained renaissance in premium cigar culture that has drawn younger smokers into the lounge alongside the gray-haired veterans who never left.
Recent issues have put Gov. Ron DeSantis on the cover, with a conversation about his love of cigars, the future of Cuba, and issues facing the United States. Previous covers have featured Liev Schreiber, Wayne Gretzky — who sat down with executive editor David Savona over fine cigars to reflect on his long career and how the game has changed — and actor Michael Cudlitz, a serious lover of the leaf and cigar bar owner who spoke with Savona to share his passion for cigars and reflect on his thirty-year acting career. The celebrity dimension of the magazine has always served a specific function: demonstrating that the cigar is not a relic of a different era but a living part of contemporary culture embraced by athletes, entertainers, politicians, and chefs.
The podcast extends that logic into a new medium. Where the magazine can spend five thousand words on a celebrity profile, the podcast can go deeper on a single subject in real time — with follow-up questions, tangents, and the kind of organic conversation that print cannot fully capture. Both formats are stronger for the existence of the other.
What to Expect Going Forward
With new episodes dropping twice monthly and a format flexible enough to accommodate both intimate editorial conversations and industry-facing reporting, the show has room to become the definitive audio resource for anyone serious about premium cigars. The episode topics already announced suggest a willingness to move between the technical and the political, the historical and the immediate — blind tasting methodology one week, Cuban geopolitics the next, luxury pricing the week after that. That range mirrors the magazine itself, which has always understood that a man who smokes fine cigars is rarely interested in only one thing.
So far, the feedback online has been overwhelmingly positive. That initial reception suggests the audience the magazine has built over thirty-plus years was already waiting for exactly this kind of extension of the brand's editorial voice. Whether the show grows into a must-listen for every serious cigar smoker in America will depend on consistency, depth, and the willingness to take positions rather than simply describe the landscape. Based on the credentials of the team behind the microphone and the editorial philosophy that has guided the magazine since 1992, there is every reason to believe it will deliver.
The Bottom Line for Cigar Smokers
If you have ever lit a premium cigar and wanted to know more — about how it was made, where the leaf came from, why the wrapper country matters, what is actually happening in the Vuelta Abajo region of Cuba right now, and why that should affect what you put in your humidor — this podcast is built for you. It is free. It is backed by the most credentialed editorial team in the cigar world. And it arrives at a moment when the premium cigar industry is in genuine flux, with geopolitical forces, changing trade relationships, and a new generation of smokers all reshaping what the culture looks like and who gets to define it.
Print established Cigar Aficionado's authority. The podcast has the potential to extend it into every pair of earbuds and every screen where serious smokers are already looking for content worth their time. Based on the first episodes, the magazine's editorial team clearly understands what the audience wants — and has the knowledge to deliver it every single time they sit down behind the microphone.
