Last year, I discovered the Oliva Black Swan, which was a CigarPage exclusive. I liked the cigar so much that I bought four 10-packs. By the end of the year, CP had sold out of them and only had the sampler available. I had been checking CP regularly to see when they’d have them back in stock. But that never happened. All that was left was the sampler pack.
Then sometime around January of this year, I noticed when I did a search on “black swan” on the CP site, a new Black Swan appeared, but it sported the Rocky Patel livery and not Oliva. WTF? There was no announcement, no fanfare. It just started showing up.
The labels were similar, so I assumed they’d be the same blend. But they’re not. They’re completely different blends! For instance, the Oliva had a dark, CT Broadleaf wrapper over an Ecuadorian binder and Nicaraguan filler. The Rocky Patel has a Corojo wrapper over a Honduran binder and Honduran and Nicaraguan fillers. They’re totally different cigars!
On the surface, this might seem a little weird, but this seems to go along with the CP’s ethos regarding the Black Swan line:
A Black Swan event is an extreme rarity, and the Black Swan series of cigars is designed to take advantage of unique tobaccos at a given factory. It’s the fruit of our team on the ground in Nicaragua. We’re always seeking out unique tobaccos in bodegas that have yet to find their way into a cigar. In its simplest form, tobacco is a commodity and factories either grow and/or purchase materials in large lots to get what they need to maintain consistency in their iconic blends and brands. The result of this pattern means there are inevitably unique, small batch tobaccos lumped in that are too small to make a full-time production blend, and such tobaccos are typically stored away for aging. They may emerge for special limited-edition projects, or they may accumulate, depending on the factory. Black Swan is so named to take advantage of these exceptional but limited tobacco lots.
So, what this means is that the Black Swan will never be the same from iteration to iteration. CP’s team will go from factory to factory to find small stockpiles of unique tobaccos then create a blend based on what’s available. This is like what some cognac and champagne producers do with their blends, but much more drastic as the tobaccos used are completely different.
In the first edition, they worked with Oliva who apparently had some CT Broadleaf that wasn’t in high enough quantity to do a full production run. For the second iteration, they sourced some high-grade, aged Honduran Corojo then made blend from that, this time working with Rocky Patel. Who knows whom they’ll work with next?
Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so, though I don’t know how successful it will be. To me at least, it’s intriguing because it opens the door for CigarPage to work with a bunch of different factories. There could be an AJ Black Swan or My Father Black Swan or even a Montecristo Black Swan. Each would be different cigars only sharing the ethos of the Black Swan: The usage of unique, small batch tobacco. From a business perspective, since there will be limited quantities, it means that CP won’t have to carry a lot of inventory once the run has been exhausted.
I do wish them well simply because it will be something new to look forward to as they work with different blenders.
Update July 9, 2025: Since I wrote this post, CigarPage has released yet another Black Swan; this time from EP Carrillo. Now we have three different versions of the Black Swan. What’s really cool about this is that not only are the blends and blenders different, the cigars are rolled in different countries! The Oliva is rolled in Nicaragua, the Rocky Patel is rolled in Honduras, and the EP Carrillo is rolled in the Dominican Republic. Combine that with different blends, what you get are competely different cigars.
I have an order in for some EP Carrillo Black Swan. I’ve had the Rocky Patel Black Swan and it was just okay. But to be fair I need to give it another try because when I had it, I compared it to the Oliva version, when I should have judged it on its own merits. But I’m excited to see how the EPC will be!
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