Zino Davidoff

Zino Davidoff (born Sussele-Meier Davidoff, later russified as Zinovy Davidoff; 11 March 1906 – 14 January 1994) was a Swiss tobacconist, cigar merchant and author of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. The proprietor of the Davidoff tobacco shop in Geneva from the early 1930s until his death, he established the Davidoff name as one of the world's most recognised luxury cigar brands and was widely known by the epithet "King of Cigars". He is credited with the invention of the desktop humidor, with introducing French Bordeaux nomenclature to the cigar trade through his 1946 Château series, and with persuading Cuba's state tobacco monopoly to roll a personal house brand for him at the El Laguito factory in Havana — the same atelier that produced Fidel Castro's Cohíbas. His 1967 work The Connoisseur's Book of the Cigar (Le livre du connaisseur de cigare) sold more than 200,000 copies in multiple languages and became a standard reference of cigar literature.