In 1980, Arturo Fuente family patriarch Don Carlos Fuente Senior made the decision to move his company and his family to the Dominican Republic. It was there that he relocated the business founded 68 years earlier by his father, the legendary Arturo Fuente.
But it was Don’s son, Don “Carlito” Carlos Fuente Junior who took the business to the next level just 10 years later when Carlito became determined to not just assemble cigars using tobacco from other sources and countries, but to cultivate his own family’s crop of tobacco on land it owned.
By purchasing a small plot of farmland in the mineral-dense soils of the island’s Bonao Valley from tobacco grower Angel Oliva and then aging the resulting leaves, Carlito proved domestic and international naysayers wrong when they said a world-class Dominican smoke couldn’t be produced.
Growing the 37-acre plot into the greater-than-300-acre estate it is today, he christened the farm “Chateau de la Fuente,” and it’s since become renowned as the source of many of the richest, most-lauded tobaccos in the world.
It’s these tobaccos — from the Fuente family’s private reserve — that are incorporated into this Chateau Fuente Queen B vitola, inside a sweet Ecuadorean sun-grown wrapper. The resulting cigar is medium-strength, rich and complex, yet balanced. Ever since its late-2000s release, smokers have remarked favorably on the toasty, nutty, coffee bean-ish flavors in this torpedo-shaped vitola that was rated a 91 by Cigar Aficionado in 2012.