Cigar Ratings Explained: What a 90 Point Score Actually Measures
November 2, 2026
Somebody hands you a cigar and tells you it got a 93. You nod, because 93 sounds good. But 93 out of what, judged by whom, against which other cigars, and on a scale where almost nothing ever falls below 85? Cigar ratings are one of the most quoted numbers in this business and one of the least examined. They are not meaningless. They are also not what most people think they are.
Quick Answer: A cigar rating is one publication’s weighted summary of how a specific cigar performed for a specific panel on a specific day. The two most quoted scales run to 100 points. Cigar Aficionado has rated blind since 1992, stripping the bands and replacing them with numbered labels so the taster does not know the brand, the price or the country until scoring is finished. halfwheel uses a scoresheet that is not itself out of 100 and runs it through an algorithm, with flavor carrying roughly double the weight of construction and balance combined. Reader awards such as Cigar Journal’s Cigar Trophy are a different instrument entirely: those are votes, not tastings. The practical range on a 100 point cigar scale is narrow, most released cigars land in the high 80s and low 90s, and the difference between an 89 and a 91 is far smaller than the difference between the same cigar stored well and stored badly.
Direct answer: A score is a weighted sum of separate judgments about how the cigar looked, how it drew and burned, how it tasted, and how those elements held together from start to finish. Taste and complexity carry the most weight on every serious scale. Nothing in a score measures value, prestige, rarity or how much the reviewer liked the company.
Break the exercise into its parts and the number starts to look less like a verdict and more like a summary. A reviewer sitting with a cigar is tracking several separate things at once, and the good systems force those things apart on paper before adding them back together.
The first is physical: does the wrapper look right, is the cigar tidy, is there an obvious flaw. Cigar Aficionado’s published account of its method lists appearance among the scored elements and treats it as the lightest of them. halfwheel is blunter still, giving appearance a simple pass or fail that amounts to roughly a single point, and noting there are not many cases where a cigar actually loses that point.
The second is mechanical: draw, burn, smoke production. A cigar that will not pull, or that runs up one side and needs relighting three times, is failing at the one job that has nothing to do with the blend. This is the part of the score most directly traceable to the person who rolled it, which is worth remembering when a number gets attributed entirely to the blender.
The third and heaviest is flavor and its behavior over time. Both major scales put the bulk of the weight here. Cigar Aficionado’s method places complexity and harmony at the top of its weighting. halfwheel scores flavor at roughly double the value of construction and balance combined, and evaluates balance separately as how the cigar progresses and how body, strength and flavor perform together.
Direct answer: Blind tasting removes the band, the price and the country of origin from the taster’s knowledge so that reputation cannot do the scoring. Cigar Aficionado has worked this way since 1992, with a tasting coordinator who is not on the panel buying the cigars, rebanding them with numbered labels and keeping the key.
Everything credible about a published score depends on this one procedural choice, and it is worth understanding the mechanics because they are unglamorous and specific. The magazine’s own description of its tasting process explains that a coordinator outside the panel buys cigars at retail, creates a code, places a number on a generic white label, and gives the relabeled cigars to the panel. The cigars are kept humidified, in a walk in humidor or in bags with humidification packs. Panel members smoke them independently. The raters do not learn the price, the country or any other identifying detail until the test is complete and the scores are finalized.
Read that list of precautions and you can reverse engineer the biases it is designed to defeat. Brand familiarity, obviously. But also price anchoring, which is the tendency to find more in an expensive cigar because it cost more. Also national reputation, which is real and heavy in this trade. Also the social pressure of scoring in a group, which is why panelists smoke alone.
None of this makes a blind score objective in the way a laboratory measurement is objective. Palates differ, a cigar smoked on a windy patio behaves differently from one smoked indoors, and any panel has house preferences that emerge over years. What blind tasting buys is narrower and still valuable: it means the number came from the cigar rather than from the name on the box.
The two most cited numeric scales in the American market both run to 100, which creates the impression that they are the same instrument. They are not, and the differences are worth knowing before you compare a score from one against a score from the other.
Cigar Aficionado’s scale is a sum of weighted category points with a maximum of 100. Its published breakdown names appearance, draw, combustion, complexity and harmony, with each category weighted and the first carrying the least importance and the last the most. The magazine reserves the word classic for cigars scoring 95 or higher.
halfwheel arrives at a 100 point number by a different road. Its published account of how it reviews explains that the scoresheet itself is not out of 100. Reviewers fill in a sheet that scores flavor in thirds with descriptors, scores construction in thirds covering draw, smoke production and burn, assesses balance across the whole smoke, and gives appearance a pass or fail. An algorithm converts that sheet into the published number. Where possible the publication smokes three cigars per review, scores each independently, and feeds all three into the formula.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. A single cigar is a sample of one from a production run that varies. Three cigars will not eliminate variance, but a reviewer who smokes three and finds one plugged has information a reviewer who smokes one does not.
The table below sets the main kinds of rating side by side. The point is not that one is right and the others are wrong. It is that they answer different questions, and quoting them interchangeably is where the confusion starts.
| Instrument | Who decides | Blind? | What carries the most weight | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cigar Aficionado 100 point score | An editorial tasting panel | Yes, bands removed and replaced with numbered labels since 1992 | Complexity and harmony, with appearance weighted least | How did this cigar perform for trained tasters who did not know what it was |
| halfwheel 100 point score | A named reviewer, usually across three cigars | No, the reviewer knows the cigar | Flavor, at roughly double construction and balance combined | How did this cigar perform in detail, with the reasoning published alongside |
| Cigar Journal Cigar Trophy | Readers, by nomination and then a vote on shortlists | No | Popularity and standing among the voting readership | What do enthusiasts rate highly enough to vote for |
| Retail star ratings | Verified or unverified customers | No | Satisfaction, and often price expectation | Were buyers happy with what arrived |
Direct answer: An award is a vote or an editorial selection, not a tasting score. Cigar Journal’s Cigar Trophy is decided by readers who first nominate candidates and then choose the winner from a shortlist, across categories including Best Brand, Best Cigar, Best Value, Best Boutique Brand, Best Accessory and Best Lounge.
September 2026 gave a clean example of the distinction. The trade gathered in Dortmund for InterTabac, and on the fifteenth Cigar Journal held its ceremony and published the 2026 Cigar Trophy results. Arturo Fuente Chateau Fuente took Best Brand for the Dominican Republic. Plasencia Cosecha 149 Toro took Best Cigar for Honduras. Jorge Padron received the Lifetime Achievement award.
Look at what produced those outcomes. Nobody sat in a sealed room with an unbanded cigar. A readership nominated names it already knew, then picked from a short list of names it already knew. That is a legitimate and interesting signal, and it is a signal about reputation and loyalty rather than about what happened to a specific stick on a specific afternoon. A brand that has been making a consistent cigar for decades accumulates exactly this kind of standing, and the award reflects it honestly.
The failure mode is quoting the two as if they were the same currency. A cigar can win a reader award without ever having been blind scored. A cigar can score 94 in a blind panel and never appear on a ballot because hardly anyone has heard of it. Neither fact contradicts the other.
Direct answer: The usable range on a 100 point cigar scale is roughly a dozen points wide in practice, because cigars that are genuinely badly made mostly do not reach a reviewer’s humidor. In its analysis of a full year of blind tastings, Cigar Aficionado reported that 268 of 628 cigars rated, about 43 percent, scored 90 or higher.
Compression is the single most useful thing to understand about these numbers, and the published data makes the shape of it visible. The magazine’s year long breakdown of its own scores shows just 51 cigars out of that 628 reaching 93 or higher: 35 at 93, 12 at 94 and four at 95. Country averages sat in a very tight band, with Nicaragua at 89.17 across 296 cigars, Honduras at 88.81 across 59, the Dominican Republic at 88.61 across 169, and Cuba highest at 90.49 across 80.
Sizes cluster the same way. In that year, figurados averaged 89.57 across 93 cigars, robustos 89.43 across 101, toros 89.07 across 152, Churchills 88.84 across 81 and thick grandes 88.22 across 76. Every one of those category averages falls inside a range of a point and a half. If you were hoping a score would sort the market into clear tiers, this is the data that should adjust your expectations.
Two consequences follow. First, small gaps are noise. An 89 and a 91 are not meaningfully different cigars, and treating them as different is reading precision into a number that does not have it. Second, the tail is where the information lives. A 95 is rare enough to be worth noticing precisely because four cigars out of 628 got there.
Scores are most useful as a filter and least useful as a verdict. A few habits make the difference.
Storage deserves its own line here, because it swamps everything above. A cigar held at the wrong humidity will underperform its own score by a wide margin, and no rating protects you from that. Our guide to how to store cigars covers the ranges that matter.
There is an honest case that the whole apparatus is overweighted, and it deserves to be made properly rather than waved away.
A score cannot tell you about consistency across a box. Panels rate a handful of cigars; you buy twenty five. It cannot tell you about the cigar you will actually smoke a year from now, since premium tobacco changes in a humidor and the reviewed cigar was reviewed young. It cannot account for your own tolerance for strength, your preferred time of day, or the fact that the same blend reads differently in a robusto than in a lancero, which is why format matters as much as blend and why we wrote a separate guide to cigar sizes and shapes.
It also cannot price anything. Value is a relationship between what a cigar delivers and what it costs, and a blind panel that does not know the price is by design incapable of assessing it. That is a feature of the method, not a flaw, but it means the buyer has to supply the missing half of the equation.
And a score cannot tell you whether a cigar suits the occasion. A 94 point full bodied gordo is the wrong cigar to hand someone at nine in the morning on the first tee, and no number on a shelf talker will catch that mistake for you.
Every one of the mechanical elements a rating tries to capture, draw, burn, smoke production, an even density that does not fail halfway, is decided at the rolling table long before anybody scores it. That is the part of the craft a number summarizes and never explains.
Founder and master roller Raul Triana learned the trade in Cabaiguan, Cuba, and brings more than 35 years at the bench to every cigar he rolls by hand in Boca Raton, Florida. Judging filler density by feel, setting a bunch that will draw evenly from the first inch to the last, finishing a cap so it holds: these are the decisions that a construction score is quietly grading. You can read how that work began on our about us page.
A live rolling event in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Orlando or the Florida Keys puts your guests a few feet from that table, which is a more direct education than any scoring scale. For a packaged expression of the same craft, the Super Premium Collection arrives hand packed in a handcrafted cedar box, and every order from the RTS Cigars shop ships free.
For adults 21+ only. RTS Cigars products are intended for adults of legal purchasing age.
A rating is a weighted summary of separate judgments about a cigar’s appearance, its draw and burn, its flavor, and how those elements hold together across the smoke. Flavor and complexity carry the most weight on every serious scale, and appearance carries the least. A score does not measure price, value, rarity or reputation.
It is a competent one. Because the practical range on a 100 point cigar scale is narrow, 90 sits close to the middle of what gets published rather than near the top. In one full year of blind tastings Cigar Aficionado reported that about 43 percent of the cigars it rated scored 90 or higher, so the mark is common rather than exceptional.
It means the taster does not know what they are smoking. Cigar Aficionado has a coordinator outside the panel buy cigars at retail, remove the original bands and replace them with generic numbered labels. Panel members smoke independently and do not learn the price, the country of origin or any other detail until the scores are finalized. The magazine has worked this way since 1992.
Because they are different instruments. Cigar Aficionado scores blind with an editorial panel and weights complexity and harmony most heavily. halfwheel reviews are written by a named reviewer who knows the cigar, usually across three samples, using a scoresheet that is not itself out of 100 and is converted by an algorithm, with flavor weighted at roughly double construction and balance combined.
No. An award such as Cigar Journal’s Cigar Trophy is a vote. Readers nominate candidates and then choose winners from shortlists in categories like Best Brand, Best Cigar, Best Value, Best Boutique Brand, Best Accessory and Best Lounge. That measures standing among a readership, which is a real signal but a different one from a blind tasting score.
Smaller than most people assume. Published country and size averages cluster within a point or two of each other, so an 89 and a 91 are best treated as a tie. Differences become interesting at the edges of the scale, where very few cigars land, rather than in the middle where most of them sit.
Use them as a filter rather than a verdict. Read the tasting note instead of the number, check which kind of rating you are looking at, and find a reviewer whose described preferences match your own. Then buy a single cigar and decide for yourself, because a rating cannot account for your palate, your storage or the occasion.
Considerably. A cigar held too wet will draw poorly and burn unevenly, and one held too dry will smoke hot and lose aroma, in both cases performing well below what any panel recorded. Storage conditions are the single largest variable between a published score and the cigar you actually light.
