Geneva

Geneva grows nothing and manufactures almost nothing, which is precisely why it worked. A Jewish family from the Russian Empire, the Davidoffs, arrived in 1911 after fleeing pogroms, and Henri Davidoff opened a tobacco shop. His son Zino, born in 1906, spent the second half of the 1920s travelling in South and Central America learning how tobacco is grown and rolled, then came back in 1930 to a small shop in a small neutral city with hard currency, discreet banking and customers from everywhere.

What Zino Davidoff actually invented was less a cigar than a system of presentation. He converted the shop cellar into a climate-controlled store for Havana leaf, an early commercial humidor, and in 1939 bought two million Havanas from the French monopoly before war closed the trade. In 1946 he launched the Chateau series, naming Cuban cigars after Bordeaux first growths and importing wine's vocabulary of vintage and estate wholesale into tobacco. His 1967 book, The Connoisseur's Book of the Cigar, sold in the hundreds of thousands and taught a generation how to talk about smoking.

The break with Cuba is the part that still divides opinion. Davidoff-branded cigars were made at El Laguito in Havana from 1968-69, and the Oettinger group of Basel took over the Geneva shop and the brand in 1970. In 1989, dissatisfied with quality, the company destroyed about 130,000 Cuban-made cigars. The first Dominican-made Davidoffs reached the market in 1990, and in December 1991 Davidoff and Cubatabaco agreed to end Cuban production, with remaining stock to be sold by the end of 1992. Zino Davidoff died in Geneva on 14 January 1994.

Geneva's contribution to tobacco is commercial and taxonomic rather than agricultural. The Chateau series applied the language of Bordeaux classification to Havanas, and the appointed-merchant network built from Geneva in the 1970s standardized how premium cigars were stored, graded and sold in shops around the world. When production moved to the Dominican Republic after 1990, the blends were built around Dominican-grown seed varieties with Connecticut and Ecuadorian wrappers, and the Chateau names were replaced by Grand Cru. The city itself remains a retail and headquarters function, not a manufacturing one.

Geneva's cigar culture is a retail culture: reserved lockers, accounts, discretion, and the assumption that the merchant knows more than the customer. The city's international population, its banks and its diplomatic circuit gave the shop a clientele out of all proportion to the canton's size, and Davidoff's habit of naming products after wine estates was aimed squarely at that audience. Switzerland's federal ban on smoking in enclosed public places took effect in 2010, so most smoking now happens in dedicated lounges and on hotel terraces along the lake. The Geneva model, a merchant as arbiter of taste, was exported to London, New York and Hong Kong.