For many fans of Arturo Fuente cigars, the Hemingway line is one of the brand’s greatest. Hemingway sticks have achieved a 90-or-better rating from Cigar Aficionado an unprecedented 57 times, ranking in the magazine’s Top 25 Cigars of the Year list no less than three times (with this specific cigar — the Work of Art — placing sixth in 2018, with a rating of 94).
Named after the man who just might have been America’s greatest novelist (who happened to reside in not one, but two locations famous for cigar-making — Cuba and Key West), the Hemingway lives up to its moniker via the adventurous and creative shape — known as the Perfecto — of its vitolas.
The Perfecto is an old-fashioned cigar form that features a nipple-like end at its foot. It’s drawn from the heyday of shaped smokes — the 1920s through the 1940s — a time when the original Arturo Fuente company was operating out of Tampa, Florida. Modern-day Arturo Fuente chief Don “Carlito” Carlos Fuente Junior sought to revive this style of cigar art after seeing it almost disappear by the time he acquired ownership of the firm founded by his grandfather.
In helping to restore this nearly lost format, Carlito ended up releasing one of the most unique and significant cigars of the last 40 years.
But the unusual shape isn’t the only element that sets the Hemingway apart from other smokes. These bold, memorable cigars take sweet, rare, tasty Cameroonian wrapper leaf and mold it around aged Dominican fillers and a Dominican binder to produce spicy, nutty, toasty, citrusy, medium-to-full-strength sticks that are filled with as much life and character as the legendary writer the line is named after.
Suffice it to say that with this Work of Art, your spirit may be rising just as the sun also does, Hemingway notwithstanding.