Cigar of the Year: Every Cigar Aficionado Winner Since 2004 (and Whether to Chase One)

Here is every Cigar Aficionado Cigar of the Year from the first one in 2004 through the 2025 winner. The country is the one the magazine assigns, which is where the cigar is made, not necessarily where all the tobacco is grown. The E.P. Carrillo winners, for example, use Nicaraguan filler but are rolled in the Dominican Republic.

The price column is the single-cigar price Cigar Aficionado listed when it rated each cigar. Prices have gone up since, sometimes a lot, so treat it as a snapshot of what the cigar cost the year it won. The Cuban winners are priced in pounds because Cuban cigars are not sold in the US, and the magazine prices them from the UK market.

The magazine itself launched in 1992, so the Top 25 started more than a decade into its life. Anything you see called a Cigar Aficionado Cigar of the Year from before 2004 is a different list or a mistake.

Cigar Aficionado hasn't published its 2026 schedule as I write this, so I won't pretend to know the exact day. What I can tell you is how last year went. The 2025 list was counted down over one week in December: Nos. 10 to 8 on Monday, December 15, then three a day through Wednesday, the Cigar of the Year on Thursday, December 18, and Nos. 11 to 25 on Friday, December 19, each at 10 a.m. Eastern on cigaraficionado.com. The full list then ran in the January/February 2026 print issue.

If 2026 follows the same pattern, the winner lands in mid-December. Either way, this page gets updated the day it is announced, with the new winner added to the table and the patterns below recounted.

It starts with the ratings the magazine publishes all year. Every cigar Cigar Aficionado rates is smoked blind: the bands come off, coded bands go on, and the tasters don't know the name, country, blend, or price. For the 2025 list, a cigar had to have scored 92 points or higher during the year, in the magazine or in its newsletter Cigar Insider, just to be considered.

Then comes the part most people don't know about. The editors repurchase the finalists, re-band them with new codes, and smoke them blind again, head to head, in bracket-style rounds. Final placement comes from cumulative performance across those rounds, not just the original score. According to the magazine's December 2025 explanation of the process, it also keeps only the highest-scoring cigar from any one brand, drops cigars that are no longer on the market or too scarce to buy, and breaks ties in favor of newer releases.

The earlier lists worked a little differently. Back in 2009 the editors described weighing price, availability, and intangibles as tiebreakers for the top spot. You can see that old thinking in 2008, when the $5.25 Casa Magna Colorado Robusto, rated 93, was named Cigar of the Year over the No. 2 cigar, a Padrón 1926 80 Years Maduro rated 96 at $30. The recent explanation leans much harder on the blind re-tasting.

Once you put every winner in one table, a few things jump out.

Nicaragua dominates. Exactly half of all winners, 11 of 22, are Nicaraguan. The Dominican Republic has six, Cuba four, and Honduras one, the 2011 Alec Bradley Prensado. The last decade is more balanced: five Dominican winners, four Nicaraguan, and one Cuban.

A handful of families win over and over. Padrón has won five times (2004, 2007, 2009, 2021, and 2025), a record no other brand comes close to. The Fuente family has three: OpusX in 2005 and 2023, plus the Don Carlos Eye of the Shark in 2017. The García family's My Father Cigars has three as well, counting the Flor de las Antillas they make, along with Le Bijou 1922 and The Judge. Ernesto Perez-Carrillo has two. Together those four account for 13 of the 22 titles. The four Cuban wins went to four different brands: Bolívar, Cohiba, Montecristo, and H. Upmann.

The winners are cheaper than you'd guess. Of the 18 non-Cuban winners, 15 were priced under $20 when they won, and the middle of the pack sits around $13 to $14. The cheapest was the 2008 Casa Magna Colorado Robusto at $5.25, and the 2012 Flor de las Antillas Toro was $6.90. The 2025 Padrón at $75 is a genuine outlier, three times the price of the next most expensive non-Cuban winner.

Scores have crept up. The first winner was rated 93, and so was 2008's. Since 2010, every winner has been rated at least 96, and three of them hit 98: 2020, 2022, and 2024.

Pointed heads show up a lot. The Montecristo No. 2, H. Upmann No. 2, Padrón 1964 Torpedo, Le Bijou Torpedo, Melanio Figurado, Andalusian Bull, Quattro Nicaragua Maestro, and the 2025 Perfecto all taper. I wouldn't read too much into that, but if you've been avoiding torpedoes, this list is a decent nudge.

My honest take: smoke them, but don't chase them.

The award is real. These cigars got there by beating other excellent cigars in repeated blind tastings, which is more rigor than most lists bother with. If you want a shortcut to cigars that a panel of experienced smokers rated highly without seeing the band, this table is a good one.

But the week the winner is announced is the worst week to buy it. Shops sell through their stock, retailers bundle the winner into Cigar of the Year samplers, and anybody selling on the secondary market prices in the hype. Most winners are regular production cigars, partly because the magazine drops anything too scarce to buy. Wait a couple of months and they often turn up again at the normal price. The exceptions are cigars that were already hard to find, like OpusX, and anniversary releases, where waiting may not help and overpaying definitely won't.

Remember what was actually tasted, too. The panel smoked specific cigars from a specific production run. The box you buy next year may be a different crop, and different storage on the way to you. A Cigar of the Year is a strong hint about a blend, not a guarantee about the stick in your hand.

And your palate still gets the final vote. A 98-point full-bodied Nicaraguan is not a better cigar for you if you prefer a mild Connecticut. Several winners here are full strength, so if you're newer to cigars, eat first and start with one of the milder or medium options, or work up to it.

If you do buy a few, smoke one right away and let the rest rest. Most of these cigars arrive ready to smoke, but a few months in a stable humidor rarely hurts, and comparing the fresh stick with a rested one is the best way to learn what aging does to a cigar you already know.

Cigar Aficionado's is the best known, but it's not the only Cigar of the Year out there, and the winners rarely agree. That's useful: a cigar that shows up across several of these lists is a safer bet than a single No. 1.

halfwheel publishes its own staff Top 25 every year, and separately runs The Consensus, which combines dozens of Top 10 and Top 25 lists from magazines, blogs, and YouTubers into one weighted ranking. It has done that every year since 2012, and if you only read one list besides Cigar Aficionado's, I'd make it that one, because it averages out everyone's quirks. Its own author is upfront that the method has flaws, which I appreciate.

The international magazine Cigar Journal, whose ratings come from a large blind tasting panel, names its own Cigar of the Year. Its 2025 pick, the El Pulpo The Eel Lancero, was announced on January 30, 2026, so its timing runs later than Cigar Aficionado's. Cigar Dojo publishes an annual Cigar of the Year Awards with a team-ranked Top 20, and 2025 was its 14th year. The Cigar Authority bills its award as the original Cigar of the Year and traces it back to 1992. Cigar Coop runs a long annual countdown to its own No. 1.

Working through the winners list is a fun project, and it's a lot more useful if you write down what you thought. Otherwise, three years from now, you'll remember that you smoked the Andalusian Bull but not whether you liked it, what you drank with it, or whether it beat the Le Bijou.

That's what the Cigarista journal is for. Log each one as you smoke it with your own notes on flavor, draw, burn, and strength, and you end up with your own ranking of the winners to set beside the magazine's. When someone hands you a cigar with a band you don't recognize, scan it and the app will tell you what it is, which is handy at a lounge when you're not sure if that's actually last year's winner.

My suggestion for a first lap: start with the regular production winners that are easy to buy at a fair price, like The Judge, Le Bijou 1922, Melanio, Prensado, and Flor de las Antillas. Leave the OpusX, the Behike, and the 2025 Perfecto for special occasions, when the price feels like part of the event rather than a gamble.