It is the men who are leaving the room now, leaving the women to their cigars.
At the Petit Palais of the Fairmont Montreux Palace in Switzerland, some 300 international guests recently gathered for the world premiere of the Trinidad Vigía Reserva Cosecha 2022, the first Reserva in the history of the Trinidad brand. There was champagne, whisky, ceremony, and enough finely rolled tobacco to perfume the evening. There were also plenty of women.
No one seemed particularly surprised.
Perhaps that is the more interesting development. The cigar world has spent years discussing the rise of the female aficionado as though she were an exotic new species. Yet at Montreux, women smoking Trinidads required neither explanation nor fanfare. They were simply cigar lovers, appreciating tobacco selected from the 2022 harvest and aged for at least three additional years before being transformed into one of Trinidad’s most emblematic formats.
The new Reserva comes in the Vigía vitola, measuring 54 x 110 mm and carrying the largest ring gauge in Trinidad’s current portfolio. The experience begins with smooth, creamy notes of cedar and toasted hazelnut before moving toward darker cocoa, sweet spice and roasted coffee, eventually settling into aged leather and a measured flicker of white pepper.
Production is suitably restricted. Only 5,000 individually numbered boxes, each containing 20 Habanos, are being released, alongside 5,000 presentation boxes of three cigars for distribution through selected points of sale around the world. Scarcity, after all, remains one of luxury’s oldest accomplices.
Montreux provided a suitably extravagant stage. The evening’s principal pairing brought together the Trinidad Vigía Reserva Cosecha 2022 and The Dalmore King Alexander III, while Henri Giraud PR 90-20 Champagne accompanied the Trinidad Esmeralda. Organized in collaboration with Intertabak, the exclusive distributor of Habanos in Switzerland, the premiere had all the familiar ingredients of a major cigar launch: polished glassware, impeccable tailoring, serious tobacco and conversations that improved as the evening grew later.
What it did not have was any discernible anxiety about who was holding the cigars.
No one needed to quote George Sand and her observation that a cigar could numb sorrow and fill solitary hours with gracious images. This is 2026, not 1867, and the women in the room hardly required historical permission to light a Trinidad. Nor did anyone need to summon Colette, Gertrude Stein, Marlene Dietrich, Madonna or the long catalogue of famous women once presented as evidence that smoking a cigar could be an act of rebellion.
That argument has become rather stale.
Women no longer need a cigar to announce independence, challenge expectations or perform brazen individuality. At Montreux, nobody’s assumptions required overturning. Matches were struck, lighters flicked and cigars lit without the slightest suggestion that anything remarkable was taking place. In a curious way, that very ordinariness represented progress.
Kipling’s famous choice—“you must choose between me and your cigars”—belongs to another age. Today, women occupy every part of cigar culture, not merely as consumers but as executives, manufacturers, sommeliers, retailers, and commentators. Cynthia Fuente-Suarez is part of the leadership of Arturo Fuente; Janny Garcia plays a prominent role at My Father Cigars; Sandy Cobas founded Miami’s El Titan de Bronze, while Giselle Herrera has helped lead the celebrated Little Havana factory. There are women building brands, running factories, selecting tobacco and discussing wrappers, binders and fermentation with precisely the same obsession as their male counterparts.
And why shouldn’t they?
A woman can know her way around a Bolivar or an Avo Belicoso just as readily as a man. She can debate construction, draw and combustion; distinguish the character of different growing regions; pair tobacco with Cognac, rum or whisky; and become insufferably particular about humidity. Equality has many forms. Occasionally, it comes with a cedar-lined humidor.
The point is not that women have finally been “accepted” into cigar culture. That language still suggests there was a committee somewhere empowered to admit them. They are simply part of it.
This is particularly true at the luxury end of the market, where cigar smoking increasingly intersects with the broader culture of gastronomy. Fine tobacco occupies much the same territory as aged spirits, wine, watches and beautifully prepared food: objects and experiences appreciated as much for ritual as consumption. The enthusiast slows down, examines the construction, considers provenance, notices how something evolves over time and, ideally, puts the telephone away for an hour.
A cigar cannot be hurried without losing much of its point.
There remains, naturally, an old caricature of cigar smoking as an accessory to masculine power: boardrooms, leather chairs, private clubs and men congratulating themselves on something expensive. But among people who genuinely love cigars, ostentation tends to become secondary rather quickly. The enthusiast is more interested in whether the cigar draws properly than whether anyone notices what is printed on the band.
There is something wonderfully democratic about that obsession. Tobacco does not become more aromatic because the person holding it is important, nor does a badly constructed cigar suddenly improve in the hands of someone wearing a very expensive watch.
At its best, cigar culture is social glue. Conversations begin because somebody asks what somebody else is smoking. Humidors are opened. Recommendations are exchanged. A bottle appears. One cigar becomes another, and dinner plans become increasingly negotiable.
Women are now fully part of those conversations.
Even the olfactory codes have shifted. There was once an expectation that women should smell exclusively of Chanel or Dior while gentlemen retired somewhere discreet with their cigars. Today, the aromas of cedar, tobacco and smoke belong to whoever enjoys them. The drawing-room door, metaphorically speaking, has been left open.
None of this requires pretending that cigars are something they are not. Tobacco carries health risks, and those risks do not change according to gender, price or provenance. But the cultural ritual surrounding fine cigars, the craftsmanship, ageing, blending and appreciation—has long existed alongside the worlds of wine, spirits and gastronomy.
The Trinidad Vigía Reserva Cosecha 2022 enters that world as something genuinely noteworthy: the first Reserva in Trinidad’s history, produced in extremely limited quantities and presented with the kind of ceremony Habanos reserves for important releases.
Yet Montreux offered another, quieter observation. No one needed to congratulate the women in the room for smoking cigars. No one needed to call them pioneers, rebels or rule-breakers. They were simply aficionados enjoying a significant new Trinidad alongside everyone else.
Perhaps that is where the cigar world was always going.
A cigar is ultimately a signifier of one thing: that you enjoy cigars.
And the Trinidad Vigía Reserva Cosecha 2022 gives everyone who does another very good reason to remain in the room.
