ADVentura Cigars has announced that it will soon be releasing a new cigar in Switzerland called Piece of Heart, but while it will be a temporary exclusive for the country, it will have a charitable tie-in to the Dominican Republic.
The cigar is a 5 x 52 short belicoso that uses a Connecticut shade grown wrapper, Indonesian binder, and fillers from Ecuador and the Dominican Republic to create what the company calls a mild blend. It is being released in humidified pouches of five cigars, each priced at CHF 12 (1100 INR), with two Swiss francs being donated to a new program launched by a charitable organization called El Aposento.
Launched in 2015 by Kerlyn Peña and Gabriella Mejia Peña, El Aposento is a social services project in Tamboril that provides education, social work, youth group programs, voluntary cleaning of neighborhoods, sports programs, and other services to the area, with a focus on the children of cigar manufacturers. It has recently begun working with a local optician, Dr. Marylin Paez, to bring eyeglasses to children in the area whose families can not afford the cost of about 2000 INR per pair.
As part of the project, El Aposento and Dr. Paez have launched an initiative to reach and personally visit every established cigar factory in Santiago, many of which are located within the Tamboril district, so that they can talk to workers and staff about the program and invite them to participate. El Aposento has setup a separate phone number and WhatsApp account for the clinic so that workers can schedule appointments for their children, and then once a week, an entire day is dedicated to seeing children and giving them an eye exam. If they need glasses, they are ordered and delivered in about a week, with the lenses coming from a manufacturer in Switzerland. The group estimates that it will be able to get approximately 30 children per month the glasses they need.
The Piece of Heart project is being launched by ADVentura Cigars in cooperation with the CB Foundation, a Zurich-based group that focuses on creating jobs for people with health impairments on a private-sector basis without state subsidies. It has launched a project called Sozialpunkt that is dedicated to the preservation of sight and connecting those in need with opticians and glasses at no charge.
Marcel Knobel of ADV & McKay Cigars said that the ADVentura Piece of Heart is scheduled to be on Swiss retail shelves in approximately two weeks, and the company has announced that it hopes to bring the cigar to its German retailers in the near future.
It is being added as a regular production line coming out of Tabacalera William Ventura.
