The Purposes
The Society keeps its register, and its door opens by invitation alone.
Opinion about cigars is not in short supply. Reviews, ratings, forums, the man behind the counter — most of it is somebody's palate, honestly offered and impossible to verify.
The Society keeps to what can be sourced. Where the record is thin, it says so instead of filling the gap.
The record
The Society keeps a register of its members — numbered, dated, permanent. Nothing about a member's place in it can be bought, transferred, or lost.
The door
Membership is by invitation, and the door is the whole of the marketing.
The record begins here; its ground was prepared across three centuries.
From the Archive · No. 002
The House of Davidoff
In August of 1989, Zino Davidoff put more than a hundred thousand of his own cigars to the fire — Havanas bearing his name, which he had judged no longer fit to carry it. Officers of Swiss customs and representatives of Cuba's tobacco monopoly stood witness. Cuba maintained afterward that the cigars could simply have been returned and replaced; the fire said what he thought of replaced. A name, he held, is a certification or it is nothing — and the burning is the house's real warranty.The Archive.
001–100
Reserved by the Founder
The Founder's letter
I smoke cigars, and for a long time I wanted to know more about what I was smoking than I could easily find out. I also wanted a record of it — what I'd had, what I thought of it, and what that added up to about my own palate. I kept it in a spreadsheet on my phone, which is a poor instrument for the job.
The idea arrived in late 2021 and sat there for two years. At the end of 2023 I started building — a private app, meant only to hold my own notes.
Then A.I. became capable enough to change the question. What I asked was whether a person could have a private sommelier in their pocket — one that would answer what a cigar actually is and where it came from, and also the questions people would rather not ask aloud. Which end. How long it should take. What to do with the ash, and whether it's rude to relight. A good sommelier answers those without making anyone feel small. Most of us have had the other experience.
Friends and family began asking for access. In 2024 I decided that what had started as a private tool needed an institution behind it, and I formed one.
That institution is the Society. Cigar·A.I. is its sommelier. The register is kept here, and the first hundred numbers are mine to place.
Alan A. Grell
Founder
Membership
Reserved for you by the Founder of the Society.
Members hold a private archive, a standing line to the house, and a permanent, numbered place in the Society — verified through Cigar·A.I. Nothing here is advertised widely, and nothing here is for sale.
Begin with Cigar·A.I.The sommelier keeps its own rooms. This door opens into them.