Gordon Mott Most Recent Comments: See Also: Nicaragua, Part III
Posted: 10:54 AM ET, December 10, 2009 The sun was dropping below the mountaintops, and darkness was coming quickly to the small farming valley in north central Nicaragua. But Dr. Alejandro Martinez Cuenca, the owner of the Joya de Nicaragua brand, showed no signs of nervousness as we climbed into his SUV and his driver steered us out on the Pan-American Highway headed toward Managua. The last rays of light disappeared from the sky. I silently thought that 30 years before, or even the last time I was in Nicaragua in the 1990s, I would no sooner travel the highway between Estelí and Managua after dark than jump into a rattlesnake pit. Not today. The road was filled with traffic, small cars, buses and semi-trucks vying for space at every turn.
Don’t take my amazement the wrong way. This was not a smooth, easy ride on a superhighway between two big cities. It was a dangerous dance on a narrow, winding two-lane road, first through the mountains and then rolling agricultural land, some of it scarred with potholes and twice blocked by looming hulks of stalled trucks, their presence in the dark notable only by a small little red triangle sitting in the southbound lane less than 20 yards from the back of the blacked out vehicle—a foot on the brake pedal is a necessary driving skill here. There was no livestock lounging on the asphalt this trip, but that too can be a nighttime driving hazard since the herd usually forgets to put out the red triangle. And one can’t forget the two-wheeled, donkey-powered carts, or the ancient four-wheeled cars held together with bailing wire crawling along at less than 10 miles an hour in the same lane as cars traveling 60 miles an hour or more. More than once, our driver had to nearly come to a halt as an oncoming car failed to gauge the amount of space he needed to get back on his side of the road as he passed a slower-moving vehicle, and the same thing happened as drivers passed us and darted back into their proper lane before getting crushed by an oncoming car or worse, a passenger bus, its sides decorated like a holiday season, department store facade, each corner set off by another neon light of red, yellow, green or blue. Read more
Nicaragua, Part II
Posted: 04:40 PM ET, December 08, 2009 The day dawned early with a 7:30 departure to Estelí, Nicaraguan time. We left at 8:20 and spent nearly an hour slowly weaving through early morning traffic in Managua, trying to get to the Pan-American highway. Once on the highway, things sped up, but I didn’t have enough time to take up the Padróns on their offer to get a quick tour of their factory. You haven’t lived, however, if you haven’t spent two hours in a car with Jose Orlando Padrón, puffing away on his morning stogie and providing directions to his driver at every turn.
When we arrived, the Nicaraguan Cigar Festival’s opening ceremony was under way with the mayor of Estelí welcoming the visitors, followed by Nicaragua’s Vice President Jaime Morales. Morales gave a positive view of the cigar industry, saying how important it was to the country and how committed his government was to the private sector entrepreneurial spirit among the manufacturers. The country’s Minister of Tourism followed with an interesting presentation about the growing investment in that sector and statistics that showed Nicaragua to be among the safest in Latin America right now; a perfect atmosphere to visit the nation’s pristine Pacific Coast beaches, the many active volcanoes, and the wild areas of the country’s interior as well as natural wonders like Lake Nicaragua.
Nestor Plasencia Jr, the young son of the region’s largest tobacco grower—and one of the biggest manufacturers of cigars in the world—then provided a detailed history of the cigar industry in Nicaragua and an interesting discussion of the types of tobacco lands and tobacco types.
I left to take a quick lunch at the Padrón factory with Jorge Padrón and his father José Orlando—a stout offering of fried chicken, rice and beans and fried plantains…total bliss. We finished quickly and went into the factory where about 120 rollers were hard at work; Jose Orlando introduced me to several of his supervisors who had worked for him since he first came to Nicaragua in the early 1970s. Read more
Nicaragua, Part I
Posted: 11:53 AM ET, December 07, 2009 I was in Nicaragua last week for the first time in years. For me, it was a nostalgic trip, as it is every time I visit, because of my time there as a young foreign correspondent for The Associated Press during the country’s 1979 revolution and then the Contra wars in the 1980s. The sights, sounds and smells bring back lots of memories. I’m always searching for old landmarks—General Anastasio Somoza’s bunker complex on the side of a hill, a battered Texaco station where a wild firefight between National Guard and Sandinista forces took place, a fork in the road where friends of mine came under direct machine-gun fire in Estelí.
For every vaguely familiar place, there were hundreds of new sights that frankly boggle the mind. Arrival in Nicaragua used to be the quintessential Third World experience—the stairs rolled up to the plane, a trudge through the steaming tropical heat to a slightly bedraggled building with mostly open-air corridors that all caused a sweat-stained shirt before you even got through customs. Today, the Augusto Cesar Sandino International Airport is a gleaming, modern building with huge shiny steel arches, marble floors, air conditioning and a sense that you could be anywhere, if it weren’t for the Flor de Cana rum billboards and a smattering of folkloric artifact stands in the wide corridors. Or when you ask to be taken to the Hotel Intercontinental (the hotel of choice for the army of foreign reporters in country back in the day), you end up at a gleaming high-rise in the middle of a business district, not the old pyramid shaped edifice that it used to occupy and where Howard Hughes spent some of his last years—that’s a Crowne Plaza now.
Each change is a not so gentle reminder that the Nicaragua of the 1970s and 1980s, at the epicenter of the Cold War struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union, and locked in its own internal battles between Marxism and capitalism, is no more. Read more
Big Smoke ThoughtsPosted: 09:55 AM ET, November 17, 2009 Back at my desk today after a weekend in Las Vegas with the most enthusiastic, upbeat cigar smokers that you could find anywhere on the planet. The occasion was the 2009 Big Smoke, which is one of my favorite annual events. In the upcoming days, you’ll read and see our coverage of each Big Smoke night, and the two days of seminars. Here are a few of my ruminations.
Penance of a Red Sox Fan
Yes, I put on a New York Yankee World Championship hat and asked my good friend Jose Blanco of La Aurora, a true Yankee fan, up to the podium to present the hat to him. After all, it was the only honest thing to do since I had humiliated him (sort of) after the two years my beloved Boston Red Sox won the world championship. When he not only accepted the hat, but then asked me to kiss it, I did that too, reluctantly and with great pain. All I can say to Jose is, “Wait ‘til the Red Sox win it again.” Hopefully, it won’t be another 80 or so years.
Tobacco Seminars
The guys will be reporting on the details of the seminars, and the panelists who all did a great job. My thanks to Nestor Plascencia Jr. of the Plasencia tobacco growing family and Sam Leccia, the creator of the Nub brand for Oliva Cigar Co. They both showed great knowledge about tobacco, and gave great answers to the questions thrown their way. I’ve now been in the cigar world long enough (17 years to be exact) to have the next generation start to move into positions of responsibility and authority. Whether it is the young Quesada daughters, Sathya Levin from Ashton, Jorge Padrón at Padrón Cigars…the list actually is long. But the observation is the same: These guys are good. Read more
Historical Document
Posted: 03:43 PM ET, September 11, 2009 I cleaned out some filing cabinets right after Labor Day, an ongoing personal effort to get up to speed on an organization system called Getting Things Done, or to those in the know: GTD. Sure enough, one of the things that can happen when you start cleaning up what in my case amounted to a geological kind of storage system…the further down you dig, the further you go back in time…you find good stuff. And, there it was, in a file I hadn’t checked in probably 10 years—How to Judge a Good Cigar. I knew immediately who the author was: Richard DiMeola, the former executive vice-president and chief operating officer of what was then called Consolidated Cigar Corp., today’s Altadis U.S.A. Inc.
The first line reminded me how important this article had been to my own initiation into the world of not just smoking cigars, but testing and rating them: “There are two general elements involved in the making up of a fine, handmade cigar: QUALITY TOBACCO AND QUALITY CONSTRUCTION.” The capital letters were in the original. In the heart of the document, there was a primer about the various errors that can be made in the construction of a cigar: overfill and underfill. I recalled that DiMeola had led an effort to suction test every cigar that came out of the Tabacalera de Garcia factory in La Romana, Dominican Republic; at the time, it was still a pretty secretive device and he nearly had a conniption when my boss, Marvin R. Shanken, tried to photograph the machine on one of our first trips to the Dominican factory. There was a discussion of proper smoking characteristics with a firm ash, an even burn, and the presence of good mouth feel as well as an attractive appearance.
The article goes on to talk about the quality of tobacco, and the vital importance of a large inventory of tobacco to ensure consistency in the blend of each cigar year to year. Read more
Random Summer ThoughtsPosted: 03:01 PM ET, August 25, 2009 It’s always hard as summer winds down, and you’re left wondering how the last three months disappeared. The 2009 version, in the Northeast, will be remembered as one of the coolest, wettest summers on record, although the last couple of weeks have been making some headway on the temperature front. But I can’t complain. There were some fun excursions on my itinerary.
Montreal
What a great city! My wife and I started our week’s vacation there with a couple of long-time friends. Our first target was dinner at Toqué, Normand Laprise’s restaurant in downtown. We had a multi-course tasting menu that was a riotous combination of local ingredients, and a deft touch with everything from wild strawberries to foie gras. Of course, it was too much food, but who cared; every bite was delicious. We talked with Chef Laprise, and there was a brief lament about the days when a good cigar could follow a great meal. But Canada is like everywhere else in the world today—no smoking.
The next night served up the real reason to be in Montreal: The International Fireworks Competition. The contest runs on eight consecutive Saturday nights starting in June, and culminating in late August. It is like an Olympics of fireworks, with one nation each night being represented by a fireworks display company. We saw the United States (the defending champion), which was represented this year by Melrose Pyrotechnics from the United States, which had won the Gold Jupiter Award (1st Place) in 2006. The theme was Reel Movies, and the soundtrack for the 30-minute show was taken from well-known Hollywood movies. It’s hard to describe a show built around more than a dozen theme songs, but suffice it to say it was like watching 30 minutes of grand finales from the greatest fireworks show you’ve ever attended. It’s worth the trip to Montreal just for this annual event. The United States, by the way, finished third this year; Canada was the winner. Read more
You Gotta Love VermontPosted: 11:16 AM ET, August 19, 2009 I haven’t spent a lot of time in Vermont, but it’s always been my impression that Vermonters travel to the beat of their own drum. They still hold dear those values of our forefathers, especially those regarding self-reliance and the whole live and let live ethos. You won’t find a whole lot of tolerance there for anyone or anything intruding into their private lives.
My wife and I vacationed there in early August, setting up base on Lake Willoughby at a wonderful place called the WillowVale Inn, which sits on a small bluff at the northern end of the lake with sweeping views of the water and two mountains that frame its southern end like towering twin pillars: Mount Pisgah and Mount Hor. We arrived at the hotel late on a Sunday afternoon after traveling through rain much of the day down from Montreal. After checking in, I politely asked the woman at the front desk if there was anywhere I could get a bottle of wine but I prefaced my question with the observation that since it was Sunday there wouldn’t be any wine shops open. She looked at me quizzically and said, “Why wouldn’t we sell wine on Sunday? The grocery stores all sell wine today.” And, then she gave me directions to the nearest grocery store in a town about seven miles away.
Vermont hasn’t been immune to the no-smoking laws that have swept the country, so I guess you’d have to agree that there are some chinks in the traditional Vermont resistance to over-regulation. But the porch on the hotel was set-up to accommodate smokers with a couple of ashtrays and some benches and rocking chairs. But I figured it was still safer to ask the question whether or not cigars would be allowed there or not. I asked the same desk clerk, and again, got the same quizzical look: “There’s an ashtray out there, isn’t there?” Enough said.
I enjoyed a wonderful lancero cigar as the sun sank low in the sky, and the pastel colors of a summer sunset began to play across the surface of the lake, and the tree-covered slopes of the mountains. Read more
Cigar TastingsPosted: 04:47 PM ET, July 22, 2009 Jack Bettridge and I were chatting last week after we both wrapped up the taste test for the September/October issue of Cigar Aficionado. By the way, you guys are gonna love the cover subject….I’ll say no more.
We recalled how our taste tests used to be a lot more difficult. There were some issues back in the mid to late 90s where we tasted 140 cigars or more for each issue. The tasting format was different too. We would rate one size each issue, and try to find every example of that size in the marketplace. If nothing else, the cigar boom brought a lot of brands to the marketplace that we had never seen before, and for that matter, have not heard of since the end of the boom in late 1997. But our humidors were packed to overflowing and it was a struggle almost every issue just to get through the cigars, and not suffer serious palate burnout.
Today, of course, we divide things up a bit differently by doing six sizes each issue, and having 13 to 15 cigars in each category. Our tasting coordinator keeps track of each size in each brand, so that over the course of a year, we hope we taste everything in a given size in the market. But it also means that we only have 80 or so cigars each issue to test.
The thing that struck both of us about our most recent test was just how few bad cigars there are in the market today. True, there are a lot of middle-of-the-road cigars that don’t offer a lot in way to complexity, but you can’t describe them as bad cigars. They simply are well-balanced with decent tobacco and good construction.
Back in the old days, (I won’t call them the good old days), we used to come across cigars that didn’t even really taste like cigars. We know today that tobacco was in such short supply back in that period that some less scrupulous cigar makers were buying tobacco from anyone and anywhere, including plain old burley tobacco used in cigarette manufacturing. Read more
Summer?Posted: 10:57 AM ET, July 10, 2009 It’s being called the year with no summer in the Northeast. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about sitting out on a patio, or my back terrace to have a cigar and ended up watching another torrential downpour through the windows. I read it is not like the summer of 1816, when there was still ice on New England rivers in July, but this past June in New York was tied for the seventh coldest on record and the second wettest since 1869, according to the National Weather Service.
So, when I was up in Saratoga Springs for the July 4th weekend, and it was a pleasantly warm (not hot) Friday evening that promised to remain dry, I went out on my mother-in-law’s balcony. I had a glass of red Burgundy and a La Flor Dominicana Coronado Double Corona; my wife was keeping me company, and our Belgian Sheepdog, Chloe, was sorta at our feet, pacing around looking down at the carriages trundling up and down the street. We were sitting there enjoying the balmy temperature, chatting about some future travel plans and how nice it was to be outside. From the balcony of the apartment building across the street, I picked up a whiff of another cigar. I recognized the outline of a friend with whom I had been trading “call me when you’re in Saratoga” remarks for a couple of years, but we had never managed to actually connect on previous visits, even though his apartment is directly across the street.
It was late, so for an instant I thought about just keeping my mouth shut, but we had just been discussing stepping out to seize the moment, so I shouted out, “hey, Lee, keep it down over there, would ya?” The exchange that followed had the feel of some old New York neighborhood back at the turn of century with people trading friendly jabs from their fire escapes. Lee finally said, “come on over and have a cocktail, I’ve got cigars too. Bring the dog.” Turns out they had been watching the dog pace back and forth, but couldn’t see into the shadows who was sitting there. Read more
One Bright Moment
Posted: 11:48 AM ET, June 29, 2009 I had one of "those" days on the golf course yesterday. I was in a tournament, technically not in contention to win anything in the second round, although with a great round I might have put myself up with the overnight leaders in the net stroke category. After starting quadruple bogey, triple bogey, my day had taken a turn for the worse and I never really recovered. I made a go of it for a few holes, but it just wasn’t to be. I won’t even tell you what I scored; it was my worst round in more than two years.
As any golfer knows, it is one of the most mystifying and humbling sports on the planet. I began my season in April thinking that a few swing changes I’d been working on were coming together and I was going to play better than I ever have. I have. For two or three or four holes in a row, and then, inexplicably, it all falls apart for two or three or four holes, and then the swing magically reappears again. Frustrating to say to the least.
The good news is that usually this season the swing has re-surfaced during the round. Yesterday, it never did. I finally gave up, hitting a few good shots, a few bad ones, but not having the focus or concentration to play well.
What did I do instead? I lit up a cigar. I had a wonderful La Flor Dominicana Coronado Lancero in my bag, and it seemed like the only way to salvage a few minutes of enjoyment and pleasure from the day. I lit up on the 14th tee, and by the time I reached the clubhouse, I had a smile on my face and some perspective that a bad round shouldn’t ruin a beautiful day.
I’m sure next time I head to the 1st tee, I’ll have the same expectation that the day’s round is going to go well. And, with any luck, and maybe another cigar, I won’t remember much about this past weekend’s round.
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