Cigar Weekly

Highlights of the week in cigars and smoking from

For the week of February 22-26, 2010

Los Angeles – Remember the old Star-Kist television commercials that featured Charley the Tuna?

Poor Charley wanted to be part of the Star-Kist catch, but the company always rejected him with the line"Star-Kist doesn’t want tunas with good taste, they want tunas that taste good."

Good taste in cigars and how to create it was at the core of the first two days of the ProCigar Festival’s program in Santiago, Dominican Republic, especially in the seminars given at the La Aurora factory and on Hendrik Kelner’s tour of one of the fields used to grow tobacco for Davidoff:

> La Aurora: Five to taste four:
To meet Jose Blanco is to get a lesson in blending. He’s at his happiest when he can get smokers to appreciate the difference in taste that each leaf in a blend can bring.

He led a group through a careful examination of a new cigar designed by the La Aurora factory that will be released later in the year. Each attendee received a total of five cigars, four of which were made up solely of one type of leaf used in the new blend.

Each was smoked in turn, with attendees giving their opinion on the flavor, strength and country of origin of each, with the palate cleaned between cigars with club soda (Blanco’s preferred between-cigar taste neutralizer).

After smoking the four different "puros," Blanco asked everyone to fire up the fifth cigar, which was the finished blend that incorporated all four of the leaves that had been individually tasted.

The results were remarkable in that the same cigar, indeed the four cigars made of the same type of leaf, made so many different impressions on the people in the room. It proved once again, as Blanco has insisted so often, that the taste of any cigar is a completely individual experience.

> Davidoff: Mapping the smoker’s mouth:
Kelner, the legendary head of the Tabadom complex, led a tour of one of the lush fields in which tobacco for the Davidoff family of cigars is grown.

He demonstrated the development of leaf from seed through fermentation, a process which illustrates the economic challenges inherent in the cigar business: a company sinks money into growing, harvesting and fermenting tobacco, but won’t see the money from the sales of the cigars it goes into for 2-5 years depending on how long the tobacco is aged.

Kelner is a master blender and at the end of the tour, he conducted a 45-minute tasting seminar, a new feature at this year’s Festival. Each guest was given four cigars to taste, each one made from a different leaf, designed to stimulate a different part of the tongue! After tasting all four, attendees were given a finished blend that combined all four tobaccos.

More from the ProCigar Festival:

>> MATASA’s Manuel Quesada has said that today’s smokers are among the best-educated ever and that blenders must extend themselves to create new tastes for these more sophisticated palates.

That expertise was on display in a blind, brand-recognition contest in which 125 attendees participated.

Each person was provided with three cigars: one of mild body, one medium-bodied and one full-bodied, numbered 1-3. Entrants smoked each cigar and were then asked to select the brand from five choices in each category.

The mild-bodied choices included Fonseca, The Griffins, Leon Jimenes, Macanudo Cafe and Montecristo Classic; the medium-bodied options were Aurora 1495, a Davidoff, Fonseca Cubano Limitado, La Gloria Cubana and the Jose Seijas Signature Series, and the full-bodied possibilities were the Aurora Preferidos Corojo blend, Avo 787, Don Diego Aniversario, Fonseca Cubano Viso Fuerte and the Benji Menendez Partagas Masters Series.

Impressively, seven smokers identified all three cigars correctly – Montecristo Classic (mild), Davidoff Classic (medium) and the Benji Menendez Partagas Masters Series (full) – and David Kitchens won a random drawing for a free return to the 2011 ProCigar Festival.

>> The three-factory Tabadom complex in the Villa Gonzalez district of the Santiago metropolitan area was busy with activity as tour attendees inspected the facilities and got an "up close and personal" look at what producing a cigar really entails:

=> Each attendee got his or her photograph taken at a rolling station, but then also had a chance to roll – or try to roll – a cigar. If they were successful, they got to keep it.

=> An astonishing demonstration of the impact of blending was done in the gallery inside the Davidoff factory itself. Attendees who were smoking a cigar were offered the opportunity to have their already-lit cigar re-wrapped in a Dominican-grown leaf so that they could taste the difference a single leaf makes.

At the end of that part of the program, attendees were offered an unbanded cigar that is the new Davidoff Puro de Oro, their new Dominican puro that will be released in approximately four months. It’s currently under production and will come in four sizes with a gold band at the foot.