Cigar Aficionado

A cigar is “greater than the sum of its parts,” as the old saying goes. Surely, you’re familiar with the aphorism, but in the cigar world, it couldn’t be truer, and that point was driven home at the Big Smoke Las Vegas blending seminar, Smoking Like a Cigarmaker. 

The workshop gave everyone in the room a first-hand lesson on how to create a cigar, taking into consideration three crucial aspects: flavor, strength and combustion. This can only be done by smoking individual tobaccos on their own before bringing them together during the blending process—and that’s exactly what the audience got the chance to do. Each attendee was given three single-origin tobaccos and two finished cigars containing those same tobaccos in various proportions. 

“These are not finished cigars—you can’t buy these in stores,” says David Savona, executive editor of Cigar Aficionado and host of the entire Big Smoke afternoon. He was referring to the individual tobacco components in everyone’s bag. “This how they smoke them in the cigar factory so that you understand how it has an impact on the final blend.”

It was a little past noon when Savona introduced two industry veterans as they ed him onstage: Ernesto Perez-Carrillo of E.P Carrillo. Ozgener first gained notoriety in the cigar world when he worked for the family business, CAO Cigars, which later became part of General Cigar Co. After a long hiatus, he returned to the industry. Perez-Carrillo, who is a Cigar Aficionado Hall of Famer, has had a much longer career. Smokers started to notice his work when he was making the La Gloria Cubana brand in Miami. After working for General Cigar for a while he went out on his own and now produces his own series of brands in the Dominican Republic. 

“He’s known as the godfather of cigars and has been making cigars for more than 50 years,” Savona says of Perez-Carrillo. “He’s forgotten more about cigars than I’ll ever know in my life.” 

Both Ozgener and Perez-Carrillo led the crowd of over 600 attendees in a workshop that gave insight into the cigar-blending process. Like vintners who sample different component wines before making their cuvée, or whiskey distillers who do the same for their blended Scotches, cigarmakers need to smoke through individual tobaccos before they create the finished product. The audience was guided through this process and invited to smoke along.

Every last person in the crowd was handed three small puritos (crudely-rolled samples of one tobacco), all of which were a different seed varietal. The idea was to smoke through the individual tobaccos before lighting up the finished product. 

The first tobacco was a Nicaraguan leaf from the Jalapa region from a seco priming, a tobacco leaf that grows in the upper-middle position of the plant. 

“I burn the leaf and smell it,” says Perez-Carrillo. “You want to smell the aroma and figure out how this particular tobacco will work with other inventory.”

Ozgener chimes in: “You have to ask yourself, is it sweet? Is it spicy? Does it cause your palate to salivate? Everybody is different. When we were making CAO, we’d try 40 different tobaccos. My father always told me in his Turkish accent ‘Write it down. Einstein wrote everything down, and you’re no Einstein.’ ”

If the Nicaraguan tobacco was a component meant for flavor, the following tobacco was there for power. Next up was, a rolled-up purito of Dominican Corojo ’99 from La Canela, a dry region known to produce very strong leaf. 

“This one has more spice and more pepper. It’s on the heavier side,” Perez-Carrillo says. “I could blend this with Nicaragua. If I see tears in your eyes then I know it’s strong.”

The final tobacco was a dark leaf from Mexico. 

“This one labeled MSA is Mexican San Andrés,” Ozgener explains. “When they get done fermenting it, they use it for wrapper.”

After smoking all three components, the room was invited to light up one or both of the completed cigars to see how the tobaccos worked in concert. One cigar was the E.P. Carrillo Sumatra Toro, which only had two. Both are made by Perez-Carrillo in the Dominican Republic.

“Some tobaccos will smoke well on their own, but then when you blend them they don’t work well together,” Perez-Carrillo says. “It takes a long time. Sometimes you think you have something great and then after 30 days, you say ‘what happened to this cigar?’ The cigar keeps evolving.”

It was up to the crowd to decide which of the two cigars they preferred, or which cigar they were going to light up next. Some continued to puff on the OZ Family and E.P. Carrillo cigars. Others were through with the exercise and reached for something else in their bag. The day was still early and there were many seminars ahead of them.

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