The Auction Block: Where Vintage Cigars Find Their Price
From London salerooms to online bidding rooms, a small but serious market decides what rarity is worth. A tour of the houses that handle it.
Most cigars are bought to be smoked. A small number are bought to be kept, and a smaller number still end up where all kept things eventually go: the auction block. The vintage cigar market is tiny next to wine or watches, but it is real, it is growing more organized, and it has its own houses, rituals, and rules.
Buy the seller before you buy the cigar.
The specialist
The center of the market is in London. C.Gars Ltd, the retailer founded in 1997 with shops in London and Norfolk, runs OnlineCigarAuctions.com, which holds several online auctions a year devoted to rare, aged, and vintage Cuban cigars. A typical sale runs to around 350 lots: pre-embargo Cubans, Cuban-made Davidoffs and Dunhills, Reservas and Gran Reservas, Limited and Regional Editions. The operation is now part of the Dominique London Group.
Halfwheel's coverage of the sales gives the flavor: the winter auction arrives with 'a number of rare and unique lots up for grabs,' and the calendar is regular enough that collectors plan around it. For the American reader, one note matters: these are Cuban cigars, sold in London, under British law. The market exists where the law allows it to.
The grand houses, occasionally
The traditional auction world touches cigars only at the edges, and that is part of the story. Christie's in London has held sales of fine vintage and rare Havana cigars alongside fine wine, including a 94-lot sale at King Street in 2016. Cigar Aficionado reported Cuban Davidoffs and Dunhills selling at multiples of their estimates. These are events, not a program. There is no dedicated, recurring cigar department at any of the grand houses.
Heritage Auctions, the American giant, is a useful boundary marker. It sells cigar-related collectibles: label art, vintage humidors, boxes, memorabilia, even a prop cigar case containing actual cigars. It does not run dedicated vintage cigar auctions. RR Auction in Boston has offered cigars inside memorabilia sales, including a signed box of Trinidad Fundadores reported to come from Fidel Castro's personal collection. The pattern holds: cigars appear where collecting already lives, not as a category of their own.
The American bidding room
In the United States, the auction format belongs to the discount market. Cigar Auctioneer, owned by Famous Smoke Shop, runs Yankee and English format online auctions on premium cigars, including rare and limited-edition finds, with winners paying the final bid plus shipping. It is a way to buy current production cheaply, not a vintage-collector saleroom. The distinction matters for anyone entering the market with a collector's intent.
What the block teaches
Put the pieces together and the market's shape is clear. Price discovery for rare cigars happens in London, several times a year, in lots counted in the hundreds. The grand houses lend their rooms occasionally, for the exceptional. America bids online, mostly for deals. Nobody publishes an index; the closest thing to a price history is the memory of the saleroom.
That is also the collector's warning. Provenance is everything and paperwork is thin: box codes, seals, and the reputation of the house stand in for the certificates that other collectibles carry. Buy the seller before you buy the cigar, and remember that the auction block rewards knowledge more reliably than it rewards optimism.
Editorial descriptions of cigars, tobacco, origins and auction results are researched to professional standards but do not replace independent appraisal or authentication. See our Terms of Use.
