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| THE TALK IS ALL ABOUT TASTE |
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Page 1 of 2  Cigar makers on complexity, taste and a golden age for cigarsSantiago, Dominican Republic, March 7 – “If you will try a 1495, you will pick up on what complexity is.” That’s the advice of La Aurora factory’s energetic marketing director Jose Blanco, in an interview yesterday during the middle day of the well-organized ProCigar Festival in Santiago. “For me,” he said, “a one-dimensional cigar is boring. The La Aurora 1495 opened us up to complexity because of its six different leaves: wrapper from Ecuador, binder of Dominican Corojo and filler from Nicaragua, Peru, Piloto Cubano from the Dominican Republic and Dominican Corojo. “It’s complex to start off and continues and as you smoke it, you pick up hints of coffee, cocoa and other flavors. It isn’t those flavors, of course, but you get a hint that your taste tells you is like something else it knows.” The subject of flavor was on the minds of executives at both the La Aurora factory and at MATASA, who agreed that today’s cigar smoker is perhaps the best informed in the history of smoking and that the quality of leaf available today and the willingness of factories to work carefully through the process of manufacture makes this a “golden age” for cigars, especially for smokers in the U.S., who have so many quality choices in front of them. “Maybe people sometimes confuse consistency and change [in flavor],” noted La Aurora president Guillermo Leon (pictured). “If you have a La Aurora Bristol Especiales, you want to have the same cigar always. That’s consistency. But if you want something more complex, you want a 1495.” But how much change is too much? “No surprises,” said Leon, explaining that while a cigar which never changes character at all can get repetitive and dull, it does not make sense to have a chameleon that changes in flavor “like chicken to meat” during the smoke! He noted further, “When Jose means complexity, it means change – let’s say sweet and caramelized, and some hint of nuts – it moves between those.” For example, in the popular Aurora Preferidos line with Cameroon wrappers, the flavor profile begins with sweetness, but with undertones of spice and just a suggestion of pepper. As the cigar is consumed, the spicy elements come forward in the middle and the peppery notes bloom toward the end and the caramelized flavor takes a back seat. That kind of change Leon and Blanco both endorse. But it’s not easy to do; there are trade-offs in making such cigars. Manuel Quesada, the founder and president of MATASA noted that in blending cigars today, “We’re not looking for power. “You need a certain amount of power, granted. But you have to sacrifice power to get taste and aroma involved. To make a powerful cigar, you lose nuances, you lose subtleties, because the tobacco [selected to produce that cigar] is just raw with strength. You also have to figure where do you want to be on the palate: do you want to be strictly up front? Do you want to be strictly in the back? Do you want to be a combination of both, where the back – as an afterthought – feels a little, but the front feels a lot of activity. In my opinion, this is where the good cigars are, where you get a lot of activity in your mouth and everything has a roundness. |
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Did you know?
“Al Goldstein, the publisher of "Screw" magazine debuted a newsletter called "Cigar" in 1981 (folded after 4 issues).
