Marvin R. Shanken, Founder of Cigar Aficionado, Dies at 83: Remembering the Publisher Who Sparked the Cigar Boom
Marvin R. Shanken, the founder of M. Shanken Communications and the editor and publisher of Cigar Aficionado, died on October 29, 2026. He was 83. Cigar Aficionado shared the news this afternoon, calling him “a visionary whose influence on the worlds of wine, cigars and publishing was immeasurable,” and published a full tribute by David Savona and Mitch Frank. Wine Spectator ran its own tribute by Mitch Frank.
Neither tribute gives a cause of death or says where he died, and we won’t guess. What we can do is look back at what he built, because so much of the cigar world we talk about every week grew from it.
From a Newsletter to Wine Spectator
Marvin Ray Shanken was born on October 4, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied business at the University of Miami, earned an M.B.A. at American University and started his career on Wall Street in real estate investment banking. A work trip into the wine business, and a memorable bottle of 1961 Pétrus, changed his direction.
In 1972, according to both tributes, he bought Impact, a small beverage alcohol industry newsletter, using money he borrowed from his sister Elaine. In 1979, he took over The Wine Spectator, a struggling free newspaper with a circulation of 5,000, and spent years turning it into the glossy magazine read by millions today. In 1985 the magazine adopted the 100-point rating scale. Cigar Aficionado notes that the same system later became the foundation for another magazine.
As he put it, “We’re not in the publishing business,” he said, “we’re in the education business.”
The Magazine Nobody Thought Would Work
Shanken had loved cigars since college, starting with Hav-A-Tampa Jewels at the University of Miami. He wrote cigar columns in Wine Spectator even though his editors weren’t happy about it. In 1991, after a trip to Cuba, he published a cover story called “The Allure of Cuban Cigars.” On the flight home, he later recalled, he told himself, “I don’t want to die without having a cigar magazine.”
His entire management team told him not to do it. Cigars seemed out of step with the times, and the American cigar business was struggling. He did it anyway. The first issue of Cigar Aficionado went on sale in the fall of 1992, and according to the magazine, it turned a profit from that first issue.
Sparking the Cigar Boom
What happened next is a big part of modern cigar history. Cigar Aficionado presented handmade cigars as luxury products rather than commodities, and a whole new generation of smokers took notice. According to the magazine, in less than five years the number of premium, handmade cigars imported into the United States quadrupled, from roughly 100 million to well over 400 million. That was the cigar boom of the 1990s.
Shanken also put the people behind the cigars in the spotlight. He interviewed Carlos Fuente Sr. and Carlos Fuente Jr., José Orlando Padrón and Ernesto Perez-Carrillo. He sat down with Fidel Castro in Cuba on February 3, 1994. He also interviewed cover subjects ranging from Michael Jordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Robert De Niro and Francis Ford Coppola. In 1996 he won President John F. Kennedy’s humidor at the Sotheby’s auction of the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The Big Smoke and A Night to Remember
Not long after the magazine launched, Shanken created the Big Smoke. The first one took place in New York City in 1993, and Wine Spectator notes that it was modeled on his Wine Experience.
He also gave back. Cigar Aficionado’s black-tie dinners, called A Night to Remember, have raised some $30 million for prostate cancer research, according to the magazine. With Ernie and Liezl Els, Shanken and his wife Hazel helped launch the Els for Autism Foundation and the Els Center of Excellence in South Florida.
In 1999, CigarAficionado.com won the first National Magazine Award for General Excellence in New Media. In 2019, the Association of Magazine Media gave Shanken its Lifetime Achievement Award. Presenting it, Condé Nast International chairman Jonathan Newhouse praised his refusal to let advertisers shape the editorial: “In today’s media landscape, where the walls between ads and edit are nonexistent, Marvin maintains an iron curtain.”
An Editor First
Despite everything he built, Shanken saw himself as an editor first. “People think of me as a businessman or an entrepreneur, I’m really an editor,” he said in 2020.
When asked for the magazine’s 30th anniversary why Cigar Aficionado had lasted, his answer was simple. “Because cigar smokers appreciate it,” he said, adding, “As long as my reader wants to learn, we’re there to serve.”
The Industry Remembers
This afternoon Cigar Aficionado, Wine Spectator and Whisky Advocate all published or shared the news, and cigar fans and smokers began passing it along on social media. We expect more tributes from across the industry in the coming days.
What He Meant to the Hobby
We never worked with Marvin Shanken, and we won’t claim a connection we didn’t have. But the hobby we talk about on every episode, with its ratings, its release-day buzz, its cigar events and its respect for the people who grow, blend and roll the tobacco, owes a great deal to the magazine he started in 1992 against everyone’s advice. For many cigar lovers, the first real lesson in what a great cigar could be came from a magazine he built.
Shanken is survived by his wife, Hazel; his sisters, Elaine and Susan; his daughters, Samantha Shanken Baker, Allison Cohen and Jessica Shanken Reid; and four grandchildren, Jake, Lauren, Asher and Jordan. Our thoughts are with his family, his colleagues at M. Shanken Communications and everyone in the cigar world who knew him.
Sources: Cigar Aficionado: Marvin R. Shanken, Founder, Editor and Publisher of Cigar Aficionado Magazine, Dies at 83 · Wine Spectator: Marvin R. Shanken, Visionary Publisher Who Transformed the Worlds of Wine and Cigars, Dies at 83 · Wine Spectator: Marvin R. Shanken Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award (2019) · Cigar Aficionado announcement on X
