| Dominican Style |
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Page 4 of 5  In reality, Fuente has had a hands-on impact on his industry. In the late 1980s, he and his father set out to produce their own cigar wrappers, the silky outer leaves that impart much of a cigar’s flavor. Wrappers were viewed as a holy grail of growing, and the family’s plan drew scoffs from skeptics, who doubted that the DR provided the right setting for such refinement. (At the time, most wrappers came from such places as Honduras, Cuba, even Connecticut.) But in the early 1990s, the Fuente family reached their goal and released the Opus X, a high-octane cigar enveloped in their own shade-grown leaf. The Opus X is still prized by collectors, further evidence of the DR’s tobacco-growing prowess.By then, of course, prestigious Cuban brands such as Davidoff and Cohiba had long since relocated to the Dominican, and the industry was on the verge of what was known as El Boom—an explosion of interest in cigars that spawned cool-guy tobacco clubs from Las Vegas to London and pushed the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger onto the covers of cigar magazines. During the mid-1990s, more than 100 new cigar factories sprang up in the Dominican, only to wither when the market contracted and the high-rolling times turned to El Bust at the decade’s end. Among the few newbies to survive was Litto Gomez, a former Miami jeweler whose brand, La Flor Dominicana, enjoys a connoisseur’s acclaim. Gomez’s artistic approach to cigarmaking has yielded uniquely shaped smokes such as El Jocko Perfecto No. 1, which has the narrow head and fat belly of a post-repast python, and the Chisel, a cigar with a wedge-shaped head. In 1994, when he launched his company, Gomez produced some 100,000 cigars that “were basically unsmokable.” He threw them all away. “If I had started out doing this for the money, I never would have lasted,” Gomez says. These days, his factory turns out three million hand-rolled cigars annually, and his 170-acre farm in the Dominican sustains not just tobacco but also elegant paso fino horses, which Gomez breeds for competition. An amateur archer and a fashionable dresser—he leans toward linen shirts and designer jeans on the ranch, and Etro suits back in Florida—he has the manner of a man meant to be puffing a fine cigar. “If you’re in the business long enough, consumers begin to recognize you,” Gomez says. “They identify with the persona behind the brand.” José Seijas, another eminent Dominican cigarmaker, opts for a lower profile. An engineer by training with a friendly, professorial face, he’s known in the industry as the Quiet Man. At big cigar events, while splashy names like Fuente and Uvezian draw crowds and paparazzi, Seijas can often be found delivering a hushed seminar on the science of tobacco. His Seijas Signature cigar, produced in 2002 at Tabacalera de García, the factory where he serves as general manager, captures the style of the man behind it: It’s a sweet, subtly complex cigar with an earthy, easygoing finish. |
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