![]() Candelas just might be the anchovies of the cigar world, loved by a small group but abhorred by the majority - even if they've never tried one. The Hulk-colored cigars went out of favor in the early 1970s, replaced by cream-colored smokes with Connecticut-shade wrappers, and were all but absent during the cigar renaissance of the 1990s. "Right from day one," he says, "we were in the black." He chucked the old product line and started selling candelas, and turned an unprofitable company into a moneymaker. Franzblau had no experience in the cigar industry, but he was wise enough to know the first rule of Business 101: give the customer what he wants. The company, which made its own cigars at the time, was not a player in the candela business when Franzblau acquired Thompson in 1960. "Everyone out there was selling candelas," says Bob Franzblau, owner of Tampa, Florida, retailer Thompson & Co. It resulted from a unique process by which the wrapper tobacco was being cured. The popular tint was not a function of the use of underage leaf, however. (Natural cigars, the ones that make up the vast majority of today's cigar market, were dubbed English Market Selection.) From about 1958 to the early 1970s, Americans smoked billions of cigars, and nearly all of them were as green as your front lawn after a May rain. Green cigars are latter-day oddities, but they once were the preferred smokes of Americans, so popular in the United States that cigars with candela wrappers became known as American Market Selection. And the big surprise is that it scored well- 87 points. You may have done a double take reading the reviews in the December issue of this magazine, which included one candela cigar, an Arturo Fuente 8-5-8. Not green as in young, raw or inexperienced, but green as a dollar bill, a lime or a frog's back. ![]() The cigar in the photograph is, truly, green. ![]()
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