Zino Davidoff
Geneva tobacconist who turned his name into a global cigar brand, first with Cuban production and later in the Dominican Republic; died in 1994.
Davidoff was born on 11 March 1906 in what is now Ukraine; his family fled anti-Jewish pogroms and settled in Geneva in 1911, where his father opened a tobacco shop. Zino took over and turned it into a merchant house with an international reputation, based as much on his cataloguing and presentation of cigars as on the cigars themselves. He wrote several books on cigars and their handling.
His first branded cigars, the Chateau series of 1946, were named after Bordeaux estates and made in Havana by Hoyo de Monterrey, applying the vocabulary of fine wine to tobacco for the first time. In 1968 Cubatabaco began producing white-banded Davidoff cigars at El Laguito. He had already sold the business to the Oettinger group of Basel in 1970, remaining as its public figure.
The Cuban relationship ended acrimoniously. Dissatisfied with quality, he publicly destroyed a large stock of cigars in 1989, and production moved to the Dominican Republic in 1991. Davidoff died in Geneva on 14 January 1994. The company that carries his name is now Oettinger Davidoff AG. His break with Havana is one of the clearest instances of a brand owner choosing quality control over access to Cuban tobacco, and it set a precedent others followed.