Padrón Unveils a Sampler of Champions: Five No. 1 Cigars in One Box
There are brands, and then there are dynasties. In the world of premium cigars, few names carry the weight of Padrón — and now the Nicaraguan powerhouse has packaged its entire hall-of-fame resume into a single cedar-lined box. Padrón Cigars, which has made more No. 1 cigars than any other company, has just begun selling a new sampler combining one of each of its five No. 1 cigars, including its most recent titleholder, the 60th Anniversary Perfecto. For collectors and enthusiasts who have long searched for a cohesive way to experience the full arc of Padrón's critical dominance, this release arrives as something close to a once-in-a-generation event.
When Cigar Aficionado crowns a smoke No. 1, sales often spike, demand balloons, and those cigars become extremely rare. That supply-and-demand crunch has frustrated many smokers who wanted to work their way through Padrón's storied catalog but kept running into empty humidors and sold-out pages. The new sampler doesn't just solve that problem — it reframes it entirely, presenting five of the most decorated sticks in the industry's modern era as a curated flight rather than a scavenger hunt.
What's Inside the Box
The lineup reads like a greatest-hits record from a band that never released a bad album. The sampler contains one Padrón Serie 1926 40th Anniversary, the 2004 Cigar of the Year; one Padrón Serie 1926 No. 9, the 2007 Cigar of the Year; one Padrón Family Reserve No. 45 Maduro, the 2009 Cigar of the Year; one Padrón 1964 Anniversary Series Torpedo, the 2021 Cigar of the Year; and one Padrón 60th Anniversary Perfecto, the current Cigar of the Year. The sampler carries a suggested retail price of $195.85 and has already shipped to retail markets.
Breaking that price down across five legitimately top-tier sticks — including an anniversary cigar that retails for $75 to $85 individually — makes this an intelligently priced package. The 60th Anniversary Perfecto alone would eat up nearly half the sticker price if purchased separately, assuming a retailer even has stock on hand. For the collector who wants the full picture without the full hunt, the math works decidedly in the buyer's favor.
The Record That Makes This Possible
No sampler like this could exist without a brand that has actually won the crown five times. Last December, the critics at Cigar Aficionado awarded the Padrón 60th Anniversary their coveted Cigar of the Year honors for 2025 with a superb 97-point rating, marking the fifth time a Padrón cigar has received the title — the most of any brand in the industry. That achievement is not a statistical accident. It reflects decades of deliberate investment in tobacco quality, manufacturing discipline, and a family ethos that prioritizes product over promotion.
Not only has Padrón been honored with the coveted Cigar of the Year title a record five times by the critics at Cigar Aficionado, but the brand has never been excluded from the publication's Top 10 Cigars of the Year rankings since they began publishing a top 25 list in 2004. That is an extraordinary run of consistency — a stretch of more than two decades during which the brand has never slipped off the radar, never released a dud worthy of ranking embarrassment, never coasted on its reputation while the tobacco inside quietly declined.
This is the fourth time for Padrón to be named Cigar of the Year — making this family-owned business the record holder — and the brand has occupied a place in the top five every year but one, for a total of 16 times. That was the tally as of 2021. Adding the 60th Anniversary's 2025 win pushes both milestones even further into uncharted territory for any single cigar brand.
The Founding Story Behind the Legend
Understanding what makes this sampler meaningful requires understanding where Padrón came from — and the distance between a refugee's first day on American soil and a five-time champion's humidor is considerable.
José Orlando Padrón grew up on a tobacco farm in Pinar del Río, Cuba. He was raised around cigars, and his grandmother had a little table in the house where she would roll cigars for the family, using the tobacco leaves they grew. When he was seven, he had his first job in the fields, cleaning the seedbeds. Hard work would be a part of his entire life.
In 1961, the family farm was nationalized by the Castro regime. José Orlando first went to Spain, then New York, before finally settling in Miami in 1962. With what little he had, José worked to save up $600 and founded Padrón Cigars in 1964 in Little Havana. Padrón quickly gained popularity for its traditional Cuban style and José's ardent devotion to quality. To keep up with increasing demand, José moved manufacturing out to Estelí, Nicaragua in 1970.
The company controls all aspects of cigar production, including tobacco growing, sorting, processing, cigar manufacturing, and distribution. That farm-to-finish control is central to the brand's consistency. When Padrón produces a cigar that scores a 97, every link in that chain — from the seed pressed into Nicaraguan soil to the final hand that wraps the leaf — belongs to the same family operation. There are no outside vendors to blame and no shortcuts to explain away a bad batch.
The Five Cigars: A Deep Dive
Padrón Serie 1926 40th Anniversary — 2004 Cigar of the Year
The Padrón 40th Anniversary bears the distinction of being named Cigar Aficionado's very first No. 1 Cigar of the Year in 2004, the year the critics launched their annual Top 25 Cigars of the Year — a meticulously handmade 6.5-by-54 box-pressed Torpedo. It was the cigar that announced to the industry that Padrón had become something more than a cult favorite — this was a brand capable of producing the best stick in the world. It was the first manufacturer to be named Cigar of the Year for 2004 when the publication started this awards list.
José Orlando Padrón was born in 1926. The 1926 Series was blended in honor of his 75th birthday and debuted in 2002. The 40th Anniversary edition, folded into that 1926 Series framework, drew on aged Nicaraguan leaf and the house's signature box-pressed format — a format that, at the time, was genuinely revolutionary.
Padrón Serie 1926 No. 9 — 2007 Cigar of the Year
Three years after winning the inaugural crown, Padrón did something almost no brand accomplishes: it repeated. The Serie 1926 No. 9 took the 2007 top spot, proving that the 40th Anniversary win was not a single fluke of harvested leaf and fortunate timing but rather a repeatable standard built into the brand's DNA. Serie 1926 was created in honor of the birthyear of company founder José Orlando Padrón and has taken some of Padrón's greatest accolades. The No. 9, a 5.25-by-56 figurado, remains a staple in serious humidors and a point of reference for what a Nicaraguan puro is capable of delivering in terms of complexity and construction.
Padrón Family Reserve No. 45 Maduro — 2009 Cigar of the Year
The Family Reserve line is exactly what the name implies: a product drawn from tobaccos that the Padrón family keeps back for its most demanding projects. The No. 45 Maduro's 2009 win was a statement that dark-wrapped cigars could stand at the very top of the industry's critical pile — at a time when naturals still dominated most conversations about prestige. The Maduro wrapper here deepens the profile considerably, lending richness and a slight sweetness that plays against the earthy Nicaraguan core. On the band, the tiny hammer gifted to José Orlando by Raul Fernández can be seen — a warming callback to the brand's beginnings. That detail alone speaks to the kind of storytelling that elevates a premium cigar into a collectible object.
Padrón 1964 Anniversary Series Torpedo — 2021 Cigar of the Year
After a twelve-year gap in No. 1 titles, Padrón returned with perhaps the most emotionally resonant win of its career. The Padrón 1964 Anniversary Series was released in 1994 when the company celebrated 30 years in business. The cigar was made by company founder and Cuban émigré José Orlando Padrón and his son Jorge.
The idea was to make a high-end cigar from exceptional tobaccos with more age. Before 1994, Padrón's production was mostly made up of its flagship brown-label brand — a good cigar at a good price, but a creation for a 30th anniversary had to be taken to the next level. The final product was a cigar of sun-grown, Cuban-seed tobaccos from Nicaragua, and it was José's idea to give the cigars the signature box-pressing.
"Not that we invented the box-press," said Jorge Padrón, "but at the time there weren't any box-pressed cigars in the market." That presentation eventually changed the landscape of the premium industry. The 1964 Anniversary Series was an enormous commercial and critical success, inspiring other companies to follow suit and box-press their cigars as well. When it captured the 2021 top spot — with Cigar Aficionado naming it its Cigar of the Year for 2021 with an outstanding 97 rating — it was a reminder that the line which put Padrón on the map still had the finest tobacco in its bones.
Creamy nuances of coffee, chocolate, and roasted nuts coat the palate with ease. Made with leaf taken exclusively from the top 10% of their aged tobacco stockpiles, the Padrón 1964 Anniversary Series helped to set the bar for Nicaraguan puros within the premium marketplace.
Padrón 60th Anniversary Perfecto — 2025 Cigar of the Year
The anchor of the sampler and the cigar that triggered the idea for it in the first place, the 60th Anniversary Perfecto arrived with a pedigree so established that even skeptics had trouble arguing against its coronation. The Padrón 60th Anniversary Perfecto has been named Cigar of the Year 2025, earning an exceptional 97-point rating from Cigar Aficionado Magazine.
The Padrón 60th Anniversary Perfecto is only the second perfecto shape the Padróns have ever commercially released. That rarity of form matters. A perfecto is among the most technically demanding shapes in the cigar world — the head and foot both taper, requiring a roller to simultaneously control multiple pressure points across the full length of the cigar. This visually striking shape is an incredibly difficult cigar to roll, requiring the talents of the most skilled cigar rollers, who patiently produce them in small batches at the Padrón factory in Nicaragua.
Padrón 60th Anniversary cigars are handmade by the most experienced cigar rollers at the renowned Padrón factory in Estelí, Nicaragua, where they're blended to commemorate the brand's sixtieth year in business. Padrón 60th Anniversary is an especially rare cigar drawn from the company's oldest reserves of premium Nicaraguan long-filler tobaccos. The cigar is handcrafted in a round 6.5-inch Salomon with a 56-ring gauge at its thickest point, which gently slopes to a 48-ring at its thinnest.
The cigars come in shiny individual bullion-gold coffins, packaged in a set of ten inside a brown, piano-gloss box. The whole set costs $770, or $77 per cigar. The cigar is available in both Natural and Maduro wrapper, although the Natural blend won Cigar of the Year honors. Due to the cigar's complex size, only a handful of rollers craft the 60th Anniversary, making the wait to find them even more painstaking.
On the palate, expect toasted nuts, cocoa, espresso, cedar, warm spice, and Padrón's signature natural sweetness. Each cigar is produced in extremely limited quantities, box-pressed by hand, and released only when the tobaccos reach peak maturity — ensuring consistency, complexity, and an unmistakable sense of occasion. The burn time reflects the cigar's ambition: approximately 90 minutes, allowing the cigar's complexity and transitions to fully unfold.
The 60th exudes a luxurious aroma of chocolate, cedar, and leather when it comes out of the box. That's before a match is even struck. The experience from cold draw through the final third is layered in a way that justifies both the price and the scarcity that has followed it since its release.
The Scarcity Problem and What This Sampler Solves
When the first shipments of Padrón 60th Anniversary cigars began trickling in, they flew off the shelves. This impressive Salomon has become an even hotter commodity since the critics at Cigar Aficionado bestowed their prestigious Cigar of the Year honors upon it. The same scarcity pattern has played out with each of the brand's previous No. 1 winners over the years. The moment a Padrón earns the crown, the phones at retailers start ringing and the shelves start thinning. For the most coveted of the five sticks in this sampler, a buyer who can't locate them individually now has at least one reliable path to a single example.
The sampler format also serves a different purpose for the seasoned smoker: it creates a structured comparative tasting exercise. Smoking these five cigars back to back — not necessarily in the same sitting, but within a controlled personal study — reveals exactly how Padrón's blending philosophy has evolved across more than two decades of top-tier production. The 40th Anniversary's structured, angular box-pressed Torpedo occupies a different sensory world than the round, tapered, organically flowing Perfecto of the 60th, even as both are unmistakably products of the same house.
Industry Implications: What Padrón's Dominance Means
The premium cigar industry is not short on talented manufacturers, and the competition for top critical honors in any given year is fierce. Against that backdrop, Padrón's five No. 1 finishes are not simply impressive — they reframe what consistency at the highest level looks like. No cigar company has been as consistent as Padrón. It was the first manufacturer to be named Cigar of the Year for 2004 when the publication started this awards list, and 17 years later, Padrón produced the No. 1 cigar of 2021.
The sampler's existence also signals something about where the brand's current leadership wants to position Padrón heading into the next chapter. Brand owner Jorge Padrón carries on the legacy of his father, master cigarmaker José Orlando Padrón, who established Padrón cigars among the finest in the world over the past several decades. The sampler is in part a tribute product — a way of honoring the old man's life's work in a single package — and in part a forward-looking commercial product that introduces new smokers to the full breadth of the catalog in a single transaction.
For tobacconists, the sampler's $195.85 price tag positions it as a compelling gifting option. A five-stick flight of this caliber — encompassing twenty-one years of critical accolades — is easy to present as a premium occasion purchase for birthdays, milestones, or the kind of slow-burning Sunday afternoon that demands an equally slow-burning cigar of real distinction.
A Historical Parallel Worth Considering
The concept of assembling a brand's greatest hits into a single sampler is nothing new in the cigar industry, but few brands have had the raw material to make the concept genuinely compelling. Most sampler packs aggregate a brand's most popular sizes or price points. This one assembles five cigars that each, at one point in history, was judged by the industry's most prominent critical voice to be the single best cigar on the planet. That's a distinction no other manufacturer can currently match in one box.
The 1964 Anniversary Series truly put Padrón on the map of cigar connoisseurs when it was released in 1994 on the company's 30th anniversary. Unlike its predecessors, this cigar was sharply box pressed, igniting a box-pressed trend in the cigar industry. That the 60th Anniversary Perfecto now completes a circle by abandoning the box-press entirely — returning to a round, handcrafted shape — suggests a house confident enough in its reputation to innovate away from the format that made it famous.
Who Should Buy This Sampler
The obvious answer is: anyone who smokes premium cigars. But the more precise answer is worth elaborating. This sampler is ideal for the advanced enthusiast who has chased individual Padrón award winners over the years but never had them all in hand simultaneously. It is equally valuable for the serious collector who wants a documented, retail-purchased set of all five championship-level sticks from the same brand. And it speaks directly to the newer smoker who has heard the Padrón name in reverent tones at every shop visit and wants a structured education in what all the fuss is about — delivered in five incremental lessons, each one more historically significant than any single sampler has a right to be.
The $195.85 price point, considered against the individual retail values of the sticks inside — particularly the 60th Anniversary Perfecto at $75 to $77 per cigar — makes the math work comfortably even before factoring in the near-impossibility of assembling all five through normal retail channels. The ultra-rare, limited anniversary release is currently unavailable through many major retailers as a standalone cigar, which further underscores the sampler's value proposition.
There is also a smoking experience argument to be made for the order in which to approach the flight. Starting with the 2004 40th Anniversary and working chronologically forward to the 60th Anniversary Perfecto provides a genuine tour through the evolution of Padrón's house style — from the structured, spice-forward profile of the early 1926 Series entries through the increasingly complex, age-forward character of the Family Reserve and the final flourish of the 60th's Salomon-shaped elegance. Each cigar is a chapter. Together, they tell the full story of what it took to build the most decorated brand in the history of American premium cigars.
Availability and Final Notes
The sampler has a suggested retail price of $195.85 and has already shipped to retail markets. Given Padrón's track record and the difficulty of locating the 60th Anniversary Perfecto at many brick-and-mortar locations, demand for this package is expected to be significant. Smokers who have been on the fence about tracking down individual examples should treat the sampler as the cleaner, more practical path — and arguably the more meaningful one, given that it frames each stick within the context of the others.
Padrón has spent sixty years building toward a moment where a single box of five cigars can represent the entire summit of a brand's critical history. That box now exists. For anyone who takes premium cigars seriously, getting their hands on one before the shelves clear is simply the right call.
