You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Hands down, yes.”įor more about the business of music, check out my Jay Z biography, Empire State of Mind my next, Michael Jackson, Inc, will be published in June.
Asked if he thinks it’s doing as well as General Cigar and Jay Z might have hoped, his response was emphatic: “Absolutely. Either way, the venture makes up a matchstick-thin fraction of Jay Z's $520 net worth, and that state of affairs doesn't appear set to change anytime soon.īut Nat Sherman’s Sanchez, for one, thinks the Comador is off to a fine start-even if his store doesn’t carry it. Whether that’s a result of the cigar’s merit or just its dearth of availability remains to be seen. For that matter, the cigar hasn’t received much press of any kind in the months following its much ballyhooed rollout late last year. For example, though his $300-per-bottle Armand de Brignac champagne has received high marks in certain taste tests, one industry insider, Lyle Fass, dubbed it “the biggest rip-off in the history of wine.” (For more, see my Jay Z biography Empire State of Mind).Ĭomador, however, doesn’t seem to have garnered much negative press.
Observers have made similar statements about Jay Z’s other high-end products, some in very unflattering terms. “…We have a lot of cigars that have the same composition without being that price point, and that’s the reason we don’t carry it.” “Their price points are a little higher for something that we have over and over in our humidor, in terms of genetic makeup,” says Sanchez. That’s at least part of the reason why Comador can’t be found on the shelves of establishments like the Nat Sherman townhouse. “It’s a wonderful cigar.”īe that as it may, there are plenty of other cigars in that price range-and cheaper-that aficionados would characterize similarly. “When you watch us go through it all, you’d think we should probably be charging more than we are,” says Carr. The best tobacco leaves are selected and aged in Dominican rum barrels master cigar makers then handcraft each one. The plants are now grown on a 25-acre plot of land in Connecticut near the Farmington River. The process of creating the cigar begins with the seed, a strain that came over to the U.S. “Jay has been involved in every detail.”) (“This isn’t a licensing agreement or anything,” says Carr. They were able to settle on a joint-venture structure wherein Jay Z owns the Comador trademark. Jay Z and Carr started discussing a collaboration more than two years ago after meeting through mutual acquaintances. He told us, straight up, he knows what he likes, and he knows it when he sees it."
"He’s not a guy that tells you it’s got hints of chocolate," says Carr. “That's not him. According to one industry source, high-end cigars cost about $2 to make at the point of manufacture and can be sold at $10-$15 wholesale.Įach Comador cigar is handcrafted in the Dominican Republic and carrys a flavor its purveyors describe as having “nuances of wood and notes of spice.” That’s probably not how Jay Z would describe it, though. Carr wouldn’t confirm the exact number of boxes produced, but even the maximum of 3,000 would translate to just 21,000 Comadors.