Five Champions in One Box: Padron Puts Every Cigar of the Year It Ever Won in a Single Sampler
The 2004, 2007, 2009, 2021 and current champions, one of each, for 195.85 dollars. The sampler has already shipped, and its hardest cigar to find is the point of it.
Padron has done the arithmetic that no other cigar company can do. Cigar Aficionado reported on October 13 that the company has begun selling a sampler containing one of each of its five Cigar of the Year winners, a feat the magazine notes no other maker can match, since Padron has made more No. 1 cigars than any other company. The sampler has already shipped to retail markets, at a suggested price of 195.85 dollars.
One box, five crowns, four product lines.
Inside are five cigars that span two decades of the Top 25: the Padron Serie 1926 40th Anniversary, Cigar of the Year for 2004; the Serie 1926 No. 9, for 2007; the Family Reserve No. 45 Maduro, for 2009; the 1964 Anniversary Series Torpedo, for 2021; and the Padron 60th Anniversary Perfecto, the current champion, named No. 1 Cigar of 2025. One box, five crowns, four product lines.
The cigar that makes the box necessary
The sampler exists because of the economics of winning. When Cigar Aficionado crowns a No. 1 cigar, the magazine observes, sales spike, demand balloons, and the cigars become extremely rare. That is precisely the case with the 60th Anniversary Perfecto: a commemorative perfecto that Holt's describes as retailing at 75 dollars apiece, presented in individual gold coffins, and difficult to find since its crowning last December. At 195.85 dollars, the sampler prices its rarest component at a fraction of the box's total while asking the buyer to take the full family portrait with it.
The 60th itself was a milestone production before it was a champion. It debuted at the 2024 Premium Cigar Association trade show, with a small allocation released around the company's anniversary on September 8, 2024, ahead of a wider release in 2025. Cigar Coop's review notes three firsts in it: the gold colored coffins were a Padron first, the perfecto shape was the company's first since the Padron 80th, and at 75 dollars it sits among the most premium cigars the company has made. The sampler inherits all of that ceremony in a single stick.
There is a precedent inside the company. In July 2023 Cigar Aficionado reported a Padron sampler gathering its then four champion cigars in one package. The fifth title, won by the 60th Anniversary for 2025, is what turns that package from a curiosity into a complete set, at least until the record moves again. Samplers of this kind are usually built to introduce a brand. This one is built to summarize it.
What the five say together
Read as a group, the five cigars are also a history of how Padron built its top end. The Serie 1926 line, created in honor of the birth year of founder Jose Orlando Padron, took the first two titles in 2004 and 2007. The Family Reserve, the line that carries the hammer emblem recalling the tool given to Jose Padron when he arrived in the United States, won in 2009 with the No. 45 Maduro. The 1964 Anniversary Series, the line released for the company's 30th anniversary in 1994, won in 2021 with its Torpedo. The 60th Anniversary Perfecto closes the set with the company's 60th year.
None of this required new blending, new tobacco, or a new story. It required only that all five cigars exist at once and that someone in Miami thought to put one of each in a box. That restraint is characteristic. Padron's public record is famously short on novelty for its own sake: lines age, anniversaries accumulate, and the packaging follows the record rather than inventing one.
The collector shortcut, with limits
For collectors, the honest assessment is two sided. As access, the sampler is real: it puts the current No. 1 cigar, at the height of its scarcity, into a box that has already shipped, alongside four predecessors that carry their own aftermarket premiums. As collecting, it is a sampler: one cigar each, to smoke or to keep as a set, not a substitute for the boxes the five came from.
Cigar Aficionado has not published production numbers for the sampler, and Padron has not announced whether it is a one-time assembly or a standing offer. What is verified is the price, the contents, and the shipment. Five No. 1 cigars, twenty one years of winning between the first and the last, at 195.85 dollars: in a season of limited editions built on new names, the most notable box of October is built entirely on old ones.
