Marvin Shanken (1943–2026), A Key Figure In The 1990s Cigar Boom

Founder of the American magazine Cigar Aficionado in 1992, Marvin Shanken died on October 29 at the age of 83.

He did not start the cigar boom of the 1990s, but he played a significant role in fueling it. Marvin Shanken, founder and publisher of Cigar Aficionado, died on Thursday, October 29, at the age of 83, the American magazine announced. By launching his quarterly publication in the fall of 1992, the entrepreneur helped restore the prestige of a product that had fallen out of fashion in the United States.

Born in Connecticut in 1943, Marvin R. Shanken began his career in finance before moving into wine and spirits publishing. In 1979, he acquired Wine Spectator, then a small publication, and gradually transformed it into a leading magazine for American wine enthusiasts. He also regularly wrote articles about cigars for the magazine.

The idea of launching a magazine focused on premium cigars came to him partly following a trip to Cuba in 1991. Despite reservations from his colleagues, who believed the market was too small, he launched Cigar Aficionado the following year.

Rather than a publication devoted exclusively to cigars, Shanken envisioned a broadly focused men’s lifestyle magazine in which cigar ratings and reviews—now eagerly anticipated by the industry—appeared alongside celebrity interviews and articles on wine and spirits, golf, American sports, casinos and gambling, among other subjects.

Two years later, in 1994, France saw the launch of L’Amateur de Cigare, a French-language cigar magazine with a markedly different editorial approach, operating in an equally different cigar market. Both publications reflected, in their own ways, the renewed interest in cigars during the 1990s.

U.S. Cigar Imports Quadrupled in Five Years

The success of Cigar Aficionado coincided with a spectacular revival of the U.S. cigar market. While American cigar imports stood at around 100 million units in the early 1990s, they exceeded 400 million by 1997. Cigar Aficionado did not initiate this trend, which was already emerging before its launch, but the magazine became one of its most influential amplifiers.

Shanken also helped bring cigar enthusiasts and manufacturers closer together by launching the Big Smoke events in 1993.

In 1994, he interviewed Fidel Castro in Havana, despite the U.S. embargo on Cuban products—an embargo the magazine consistently opposed in its editorials.

In 1996, he made headlines by spending nearly $600,000 at a Sotheby’s auction to acquire a cigar humidor that had belonged to President John F. Kennedy, presented to him on the day of his inauguration in 1961. The spectacular purchase brought Cigar Aficionado international publicity.

The cigar boom lost momentum toward the end of the decade, but Cigar Aficionado endured. More than three decades after its launch, the magazine remains the most influential cigar publication in the United States, the world’s largest cigar market.