Rocky Patel in the aging room of his Nicaraguan cigar factory. He's surrounded by tens of thousands of cigars aging peacefully in a temperature-controlled environment, an essential element to an operation that rolls millions of cigars every year.
“It’s not exactly a glorious factory, but the cigars it produces are glorious,” says Rocky Patel. He’s talking about Tabacalera Villa Cuba S.A. in Estelí, Nicaragua. You know it better as Tavicusa and the modest operation produces some seven million cigars a year, including high-scoring brands such as the Rocky Patel Sixty (No. 4 cigar of 2023).
Patel strives to get as vertically integrated as possible and he has not only purchased more tobacco fields in Nicaragua over the last 10 years, but he plans on expanding his factory to a new facility in the future. On the final day of the Puro Sabor festival, we visited one of his newer farms, located in Estelí, not far from Tavicusa. It’s planted with 170 acres of Criollo ’98 tobacco that Patel says will produce 1.7 million pounds of leaf. Afterward, the entire festival converged for a lunch inside one of Patel’s tobacco barns.
A pair of rollers. At the Tavicusa factory, rollers work in pairs. On the left is the buncher, who puts together the filler and binder tobacco. Then the roller on the right applies the wrapper and cap to complete the cigar.
Yes, you may smoke. Rollers are permitted to puff in this factory, though most did not, preferring to concentrate solely on their work.
Quality control. Patel sees something he doesn’t like during inspection. This particular cigar is underfilled and will be rejected.
A bit of box-pressing. These cigars might be round now, but after this worker slides the slats in between each cigar, she’ll stack the trays and put them all in a crank press until the round smokes become rectangular.
Babies in the nursery. This baby tobacco sits in nursery trays until it’s mature enough to be transplanted to the tobacco fields.
Adolescent tobacco. At only two weeks old, this field of relatively young tobacco in Estelí still has a number of weeks before it reaches maturity.
Checking the fermentation. A huge pilón of tobacco ferments in a processing facility on the farm. Patel looks at the clipboard to see when the pile was assembled and how much more time it needs before it’s fully fermented.
Lunch in the barn. Everyone from the Puro Sabor Festival had lunch at one of Patel’s tobacco barns on the final day of the festival.
