Leader of The Pack

Source from:  SMOKE 08/18/2009

Premium cigars from the Dominican Republic dominate the U.S. market, but producers here are hardly resting on their laurels. In the late 1970s, when rising costs and labor issues were souring the viability of cigar production in the Canary Islands, the Spanish territories off the coast of Africa, one of the largest cigar makers there pulled up anchor and move its factory to the Dominican Republic, where it already had leaf operations. It was a pivotal turning point that unleashed the Dominican Republic's surge past the Canary Islands as the leading producer of premium cigars for the United States, and dealt a seemingly final blow to the island's remaining cigar industry. While the Dominican Republic didn't have the prestigious reputation for premium cigars that the Canary Islands had, its long history in tobacco farming and fledging array of cigar makers proved to be a perfectly viable fit. Fast forward nearly 30 years, and the Dominican Republic's cigar makers are riding high. Their stature in the cigar world has grown even more dominant over time; its mastery of farming more sophisticated; and its command of curing more matured. Capacity skyrocketed and by the peak of the cigar boom in 1997, it shipped 209.4 million premium cigars to the U.S.; 110 million last year. Meanwhile the Canary Islands, no longer able to compete by price and reduced to a largely low quality, home-based piecework industry, shipped no cigars to the U.S. last year. For much of the past decade, the Dominican Republic accounted for a solid 55 to 60 percent of U.S.-bound premium cigars, the only exception being the past few years which saw sudden slide to 41 percent by 2008. It may be a little premature to declare its reign in jeopardy, though. Granted, the pair of Central American nations that account for nearly all remaining sales - Honduras and Nicaragua - continue to gain ground. Any cigar factory that does business in the U.S. was in overdrive in the weeks prior to the April 1 effective date for the new SCHIP-mandated 40￠-per-stick tax. And in the mad rush to stockpile as many cigars as possible under the old 5￠-rate, the Dominican Republic showed its mettle yet again, rebounding close to historical average for U.S. imports, based on year-to-date estimates.

Shear volume doesn't necessarily correlate to fine cigars, of course, so perhaps it's more appropriate to think of the collective total of cigar makers in the Dominican Republic, each individually crafting their fine cigars. But with so much talk about strong, kick-ass cigars or the trendiest new micro-brews of the cigar world, are the classically smooth Dominican blends losing ground? "A great cigar doesn't have to be strong," says José Seijas, the Dominican-born general manager and 35-year veteran of Tabacalera de García, Altadis U.S.A.'s sprawling Dominican Republic cigar factory that's the largest in the world with 3,500 workers. Situated several hours to the west of the country's cigar-making epicenter of Santiago in the coastal resort town of La Romana, Tabacalera de García produces dozens of brands including well-known marks like Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta, and H. Upmann.

"Mellow, smooth cigars are fantastic, not harsh. They're more complex," Seijas says. Blends - even Dominican ones - evolve over time, sometimes by necessity due to dwindly availability of a specific leaf, or by opportunity, when blenders incorporate new varieties such as Peruvian tobacco, a powerful leaf that first appeared 10 years ago. "We sampled it and loved it," says Seijas, noting that the market largely directs his team on what to blend. Peruvian leaf is now used in the filler blend of many Altadis cigars including Trinidad, Saint Luis Rey, Playboy, and Montecristo Peruvian Square Pressed. Still, the vast majority of cigars sold in the U.S. are milder blends, where statistically speaking, smooth still rules. Falacies such as "the Dominican Republic doesn't make full-bodied or strong cigars" are silly and simply not true - Witness La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero, Zino Platinum Crown, El Rico Habano…or dozens more. There's no shortage there. One type of cigar that's not produced in significant quantities in the Dominican Republic, particularly in comparison to the country's Central American counterparts, are puros - cigars comprised entirely of tobaccos from a single country, most often (but not always) the country where it is produced. Puros have remained a tiny specialty rather than a high volume mainstay for Dominican cigar makers - Arturo Fuente's highly-lauded but-nearly-impossible-to-get Fuente Fuente OpusX is perhaps the best-known example.

Cigar maker opinion here is divided on the importance, need, or wisdom, of creating puros - a tradition embraced fully by Cuba where all premium cigars are puros, perhaps adding to the perceived pressure but ignoring the inherent challenges in blending one successfully. "A puro is not a prerequisite for a great cigar," says Seijas, who waited years to launch his factory's first and only puro to date - the full-bodied Mi Dominicana. Manufacturers attempting to blend cigars to differentiate themselves from other brands and manufacturers in the humidor can point to a number of issues in attempting to blend puros, a sentiment echoed by Manuel Quesada, owner of Manufactura de Tabacos, S.A., maker of Fonseca and Cubita. "The puro is a beautiful cigar, but it limits your possibilities of offering a wide spectrum of taste sensations, and aromas," says Quesada. "When you start blending different countries, different regions, different farms, different primings, this opens up an umbrella of possibilities that is mind boggling, and this is much better for the smoker, because you open up a whole lot of new roads to pleasure." Quesada experiments with new seeds and variations all the time, which in turn opens up new blending possibilities within the Dominican Republic. And while some cigar makers' quest for unique tastes have led them toward proprietary or exclusive access to specific tobaccos, Quesada says that's not necessary: a cigar maker must have certain elements accessible to them. "And then you can do your blending, and your fermentation, and your aging in your own particular way and create something totally different from the gentleman using the same tobacco but in a different fashion," he says. "We can share [the same tobaccos] and still come out with different products."

Ironically, Quesada's newest cigar was developed by the family's next generation - his daughters, niece, and nephews - whose mission was to add something new to the family's familiar tastes, and focused first on an unusual Ecuadorian-grown Araparica wrapper (traditionally grown in Brazil), developing a blend built around the family's own 2008 crop of Dominican-grown Criollo 98. "To our surprise, despite the youth of this tobacco, it had incredible flavor, wonderful complexity, and just something that was exciting," explains Raquel Quesada. The leaf is used as binder, and also in the filler blend, paired with Dominican-grown Havana Vuelta Arriba ligero from Navarette and ligero from Estelí, Nicaragua. The box press cigar will be released later in the year as the Quesada 35th Anniversary cigar. For Daniel Núñez, the retired former president of General Cigar who continues to consult with the company on blending, puros are a marketing issue, but also a badge of recognition and prestige. He draws an analogy to whisky and single malt to explain the difference between a multi-nation blend. "The range of flavors you find in single malt is totally different than what you find in scotch whisky, because scotch is a blend of different malts from different locations," Núñez explains. "In a puro, all of the tobacco is from one single country. That could be a great benefit, but that could be a constraint. It depends from what perspective you are looking at the cigar." Echoing Quesada, Núñez prefers having a wider range of choices to select from when creating a blend, and puros limit that range of potential flavors. To create the Dominicana Cohiba Puro, Núñez took his time - nearly 10 year's worth. Starting in the late 1990s, with 30 years of growing experience already under his belt, he set his sights on the possibility of a developing a puro - growing, curing, and aging different varieties of tobaccos in locations throughout the Dominican Republic." "There are five basic tobacco growing areas in the Dominican Republic," Núñez states. "As we move east to west on the island, the PH [of the soil] starts changing. And with that, the range of flavors changes." Pausing to reiterate his point, Núñez continues. "It's just a range of flavor that changes. It's like comparing colors with shading - basically there's only six colors. All of the rest are in shades in between." Tobacco grown in the Jima area is more acidic and sweeter tasting than the same seed planted in Mao, which would have a much less strength. Like other Dominican puros currently available, the Cohiba Puro Dominicana isn't a large production line, but rather a luxury item. It's a full-bodied blend, with Dominican filler that's tercio-aged in wooden barrels.

"A puro is a puro," Núñez offers, "and there are people who love puros, and there are people who look for something else beyond that." The ultimate blend, in his estimation, would be the ability blend just Cuban tobaccos and Dominican tobacco, "because it is well known that both of them carry not only the genes but also the soil characteristics that bring those flavors." Hendrik Kelner of Tabadom Holdings, the grower and master blender for three different factories owned by Switzerland's Oettenger-Davidoff Group, is well known for his blending prowess. His approach is to identify how each tobacco leaf stimulates the five specific taste sensations - sweet, bitter, savory, salty, and sour. A properly blended cigar will be comprised of tobaccos that collectively stimulate all five taste sensations in balance. To be able to do this, he selects from leaves that have been sorted by four criteria (but by many variations): seed, soil, crop, and position. Each of these factors affects the outcome of the tobacco and its stimulating affect on the taste buds: seed (Olor, the least strong; Piloto, stronger; San Vicente, in the middle); soil (grown in Mao, Jima, Navarrette?), crop (the season and year it was grown; drought vs. rainy? heavy cloud vs. strong sun?); position (the leaf's position on the plant when harvested - higher leaves are stronger, lower leaves are milder). But there are still other factors that affect the leaf's taste, some of which can be controlled at the time, others that can't. For example, farmers determine when the flowers on the tobacco plants are cut off - they compete for nutrients with the leaves, so the earlier they're eliminated, the stronger the leaf's flavor. If Kelner's approach seems overwhelming, it serves as a testament to the endless complexities of producing a cigar, and the difficulties and artisanry of producing a great-tasting cigar, and keeping it consistant over time. Now, when you contemplate the 110 million premium cigars the Dominican Republic makes and ships to the U.S. each year, you're bound to think of this leader of the pack in a whole new light. Enditem