Perhaps the most sought after release from CAO over the last five years is back. The CAO Amazon Basin, a cigar that debuted in limited fashion in 2014, will once again be shipping to retailers later this month. Alan Wilner, vp of marketing for General Cigar Co., told halfwheel the cigar uses the same blend as the original release: a 6 x 52 toro with an Ecuadorian Sumatra wrapper, over a Nicaraguan binder and fillers from Nicaraguan and Brazil. That Brazilian filler is Bragança, a tobacco grown in the Amazon rainforest that is harvested only once every three years, making the CAO Amazon Basin an inherently limited cigar. If that wasn’t enough, the process of getting the tobacco out of the rainforest was even more challenging: Unlike traditional tobacco plantations where the plants are arranged in neat rows, these seeds are planted wherever there is available sunlight. Once harvested, the leaves are rolled by hand into tubes called carottes and undergo six months of natural fermentation, a technique similar to that of Andullo tobacco. Once fermented, it takes four to six weeks to get them from forest to factory, a process that involves being hand carried to the river, put into canoes and rowed ...
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