Thursday, February 19 2009
By Rich Perelman,
CigarCyclopedia.com
Los Angeles – One of the endearing qualities of cigar makers, and especially those who create cigar blends, is how much they love their work. Another is that, despite all the advances in science, blending
cigars is an art.
This became obvious on Thursday as the
ProCigar Festival in Santiago, Dominican Republic focused on the La Aurora and MATASA factories, both located in the Free Trade Zone.
Highlights: At the La Aurora factory, guests were personally greeted by La Aurora chief executive Guillermo Leon and Director of Marketing (and blending master) Jose Blanco as they came off the bus. Then the fun started.
One of Blanco's favorite programs is to offer taste tests to guests. Visitors to La Aurora who spend any time with him are apt to be handed a cigar and asked to light it up right then and there and then guess where the tobaccos are from. He got to do it on a grand scale on Thursday.
Blanco had four cigars, with numbered bands, for anyone who wanted to take the test. Almost everyone did, but the trick was that these cigars – except for one – were not blended! Blanco called them “one-leaf puros,” cigars made from just wrapper leaf, or just binder leaf, or just filler leaves. The fourth was a blend of all three as in a normal cigar.
He asked questions after each cigar about the impression each cigar made, how well it smoked and so on. The outcome was a new appreciation of the difficulty of creating a cigar out of raw materials that have so many variables. And if you find a blend that works, how do you replicate the taste with different tobaccos available in future years?
A tour of the main La Aurora factory ensued, where all of the company's lines except for the Aurora Preferidos are made. There are about 425 workers at the two facilities. In the main factory rolling gallery, the ancient practice of the “ lector” (“reader”) is maintained, with one person sitting on a raised platform and reading most of a daily newspaper to the bunchers and rollers. He's paid in cigars: two per roller per day.
Blanco noted that at La Aurora, the tobacco in a single cigar and that cigar itself will have passed through an estimated 230-240 pair of hands until it is lit by a smoker. La Aurora ages all of its finished cigars for 90 days and there are, at most times, about four million cigars in their aging room.
Cigar makers always emphasize the family element of the factory and the long hours spent together. At MATASA, it really is family, with Manolo Quesada working with daughters Patricia and Raquel to create 27-28,000 cigars a day.
A photograph of the tour group with the Quesadas was taken upon arrival at the factory . . . and a copy was given to each person as they left, along with a generous gift set that included a half-dozen Fonseca cigars, a Fonseca hat, lighter and cutter, a sampler bottle of Brugal rum, a ProCigar refrigerator magnet and a map of the Santiago area. It may not have been exactly the same things Mom sent you home with after a visit, but the sentiment was the same.
ProCigar 2009: It's all about blending continues...
