Cigar of the Year: Every Award Winner Since 2021

Five years of confirmed winners, pulled directly from Cigar Aficionado's own Top 25 announcements:

Year	Cigar	Maker	Score
2025	Padrón 60th Anniversary Perfecto	Padrón	97
2024	The Judge Grand Robusto	My Father	98
2023	Fuente Fuente OpusX Reserva d'Chateau	Arturo Fuente	97
2022	H. Upmann No. 2	Habanos S.A.	98
2021	Padrón 1964 Anniversary Series Torpedo (Natural)	Padrón	97

Padrón has taken the top spot twice in this five-year span, more than any other maker. That repeat performance from one blender across two separate award years, five years apart, is itself a data point worth noting. It suggests consistent quality control across an entire product line, not just one standout batch getting lucky in a single tasting cycle. The 2022 winner, H. Upmann No. 2, is a Cuban cigar made by Habanos S.A., a reminder that the award covers cigars sold worldwide, not just the US market, even though several past winners aren't legally importable into the United States. For the US-specific rules on that, see why Cuban cigars are illegal here.

The Cigar of the Year title goes to whichever release lands at No. 1 on Cigar Aficionado's Top 25, a list the magazine has published annually since debuting the format for the 2004 tasting year. Staff and contributing editors work through hundreds of cigars over the year in blind tastings, where the brand and price are hidden from the panel during scoring. Each cigar earns a numeric score, and the Top 25 ranks the highest scorers released or widely available that year, not simply the highest score ever recorded for a blend.

A few things about the process matter for reading the list correctly:

• Bands come off before tasting. A purchasing coordinator strips the branded band from every test cigar and replaces it with a generic white label carrying only a numeric code, so no panelist knows the brand, price, or origin while scoring.
• Panelists score independently. Editors evaluate each cigar on their own and don't discuss findings with each other beforehand, specifically to keep one panelist's opinion from shaping another's score.
• Winners have to repeat their performance. A cigar that scores well once still has to hold up through multiple additional blind-tasting rounds, described by the magazine as a "March Madness-like bracket," before it can make the final Top 25. That process rewards consistency over a single lucky tasting.
• The list favors cigars a reader can actually find and buy. A cigar generally needs to be commercially released and reasonably obtainable to qualify, which is why extremely limited one-off blends rarely top the list.
• Price has no floor or ceiling. Winners have ranged from roughly $9 to $100 a stick, so the award tracks blend quality rather than luxury pricing.

The Top 25 isn't a shortlist pulled from a handful of new releases. It's the result of a full year of tasting. For the 2024 list, Cigar Aficionado's panel tasted, examined, and rated nearly 700 cigars before narrowing the field down to 25, with My Father's The Judge Grand Robusto landing at No. 1. That scale is part of why the award carries weight in the industry: a cigar isn't competing against a handful of rivals released the same month, it's competing against most of the year's meaningful new and re-released blends.

Cigar Aficionado scores every cigar it rates on a 100-point scale, and a cigar generally needs a score in the mid-90s or better to have a realistic shot at the Top 25, let alone the No. 1 spot. All five confirmed winners above scored 97 or 98, which is consistent with how tight the competition is at the top of the list.

Because winners come from working cigar makers, not one-off contest prizes, most past picks stay in production and show up at mainstream retailers for at least a few years after their win. Browse cigars at Famous Smoke Shop. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

A couple of practical notes before you buy a past winner:

1. Check the exact vitola. Cigar of the Year is awarded to one specific size, not the entire product line. Buying "The Judge" without confirming Grand Robusto gets you a different smoke than the award-winning one.
2. Expect the price to have moved. Tariff and cost changes since a cigar's win can shift its retail price. Our cigar tariffs explainer covers why premium cigar pricing has been unusually volatile in 2025 and 2026.
3. Confirm age-verification requirements at checkout. Every legitimate US cigar retailer requires proof you're 21 or older before shipping.

If you'd rather sample a past winner alongside other cigars instead of committing to a full box, several cigar of the month clubs rotate award-winning and highly-rated releases into their monthly boxes, which is a lower-commitment way to try one.

Cigar Aficionado isn't the only outlet ranking cigars annually. halfwheel and Cigar Coop both publish their own year-end top picks, and neither necessarily agrees with Cigar Aficionado's choice. Different panels, different tasting protocols, and different editorial priorities produce different rankings even when they're reviewing the same releases. Treat "Cigar of the Year" specifically as a Cigar Aficionado title rather than an industry-wide consensus pick, the way "Album of the Year" belongs to one award show rather than the entire music industry. If you're deciding whether to buy a specific winner, reading a second outlet's take on the same cigar is a reasonable way to see if the praise holds up outside one panel's palate before you commit to a box.