Tabacos de la Cordillera™ (Highland Cigars) now offers a new line of premium cigars with unique, revolutionary features. The cigars carry the brand name "Vogel™," and consist of two blends, Red and Green. Vogel Red is a natural-wrapper cigar; Vogel Green is a mellow maduro.

The Costa Rican tobacco and cigar producer is incorporating startling departures from conventional industry practices, for the Vogel brand as well as all of its other long-filler, handmade lines. Cordillera's name for these extraordinary cigars pays recognition to its director, John Vogel. The industry's leading agronomist and tobacco researcher, he has dedicated 45 years to the research and development of superior tobacco. These cigars follow the 2007 introduction of Cordillera's equally unique Fundación Ancestral™ series. Cordillera also has added two new maduro cigars to that collection ... Remedios 1942 and Santa Clara 1943.

Vogel has once again used never-before-seen tobaccos for the Vogel Red and Green blends. Like the five Fundación Ancestral blends, they are unlike any other cigars. These tobacco varieties were grown exclusively from proprietary, genetically-pure pre-Embargo Cuban seeds that Vogel acquired during his 20 years as an agricultural consultant to the tobacco industry. Vogel Green's tobacco springs from seeds first introduced at San Juan y Martinez, Cuba, in 1950, while Vogel Red's tobacco grew from seeds first planted near Santiago de Cuba, in 1951. The latter is the capital of Oriente Province, and an important source of strong and highly aromatic tobacco, as these cigars demonstrate.

Vogel grows all his tobacco naturally from this genetic stock on Cordillera's 65-acre farm near Puriscal, Costa Rica, where, he says, "I found a soil and microclimate closest to Cuba's growing conditions. Vogel Red and Green began with 'a fresh piece of paper,' with tobaccos chosen specifically to demonstrate the excellence of the cigars of Old Cuba. Due to the unique lineage of the wrapper, binder and filler tobaccos, they do not carry the familiar names of seeds used by the rest of the industry. Instead, we identify the tobaccos only as 'Costa Rican' ... their flavor and aroma are the alternative to all other cigars of today." Like the Fundación Ancestral series, each blend contains filler, binder and wrapper of only that one tobacco variety. In contrast to most cigars, the maduro (Green) is milder than the natural (Red), to satisfy smokers who like the flavor but not the strength of maduros.

Vogel Red and Green, like all long-filler, handmade cigars now produced by Cordillera, incorporate another feature ... Dead-Center Ligero™. It is the result of the old Cuban method of entubado (tubed) bunching, wherein each leaf is rolled into a "soda straw" that runs the cigar's length. This method provides a visual check for the worker to reliably ensure the ligero is dead-center in the bunch, surrounded by a ring of similarly tubed base filler leaves. During binding and pressing, the array remains intact. This solves the two greatest problems among smokers. First, the foot-to-head smoke channels virtually eliminate tight draws and plugs. The tubed ligero leaves, captured in the ring of base filler leaves, does not shift during pressing, making uneven burning a thing of the past.

The binder is finished off with a panuelo (handkerchief) cap inside the outer wrapper, which is also panuelo-capped. This cap design, plus crowned heads, make cutting easier and prevent unraveling of the wrapper following cutting, another source of irritation among smokers. Both of these techniques were common-place by cigar-makers from Cuba's Golden Age.

Another major improvement is the use of wrapper tobacco for the binder. As Vogel explains, "Its elasticity facilitates a tighter binding of the filler, which improves the progress of the binder's combustion. It is also wrinkle-free on the bunch, which transmits a smoother feel, through to the outer wrapper. As Vogel explains, "Entubado bunching, double wrappers and improvements in head construction are more labor intensive and costly, but pay dividends in smoking satisfaction."

Vogel Red and Green cigars are available in five shapes ... Robusto (5" x 50), Corona (6-1/4" x 44), Churchill (7" x 52), Toro (6" x 52) and Torpedo (6" x 52). The striking packaging, with its signature "V” is almost iconic. The cigars are packed 25 to a box, with suggested retail pricing of $11 to $12, and is now available at better tobacconists and the Cordillera Web sales site, www.tabacordillera.com.

Vogel Red (Natural) and Green (Maduro), from Tabacos de la Cordillera, feature Dead-Center Ligero, double wrappers, and proprietary new tobaccos grown exclusively from pre-Embargo Cuban seeds