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Home > What's New > Te-Amo's Alberto and Alejandro Turrent, pg. 2
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Te-Amo's Alberto and Alejandro Turrent, pg. 2
Posted: Friday, March 20, 2009
Alejandro Turrent is president of the family-owned Nueva Matacapan de Tabacos S.A. de C.V.
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Q: How old were you?
Alejandro Turrent: Seventeen. I was working part time.
Q: So you were costing the company a bit of money! [Laughs.] Nueva Matacapan de Tabacos is a very large business, a very expansive business, because you have a very large tobacco growing operation combined with a considerably large cigar factory.
Alberto Turrent: We're an integrated company. Although now, we're buying some tobacco from Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua . . . For much of the time, Mexico was closed [to importing tobacco].
Q: That's right—you once used only Mexican tobacco in your cigars. Was importing other tobacco illegal?
Alberto Turrent: Not illegal—you couldn't get permission.
Q: Was it NAFTA that changed the laws?
Alberto Turrent: In some ways, NAFTA helped make it open. But it's still not easy.
Q: Is it expensive?
Alberto Turrent: No, but it takes a long time. It's not easy.
Alejandro Turrent: There were some barriers—the tax, the import license—but at the end there was something related to the agricultural department.
Alberto Turrent: You must explain what type of fertilizers are used, what type of insecticide; you need to give all that information.
Q: So the government makes you jump through a lot of hoops to use foreign-grown tobaccos.
Alberto Turrent: Sometimes it takes six months.
Q: I know you're the biggest cigar producer in Mexico, but besides you, who else makes cigars in that country?
Alberto Turrent: There are two [major] companies [producing cigars for export]. After that, there are a lot of small companies, chinchalles [tiny cigar factories], making cigars for the domestic market.
Q: How has your business changed in recent years?
Alberto Turrent: The customers. They smoke different cigars. In the old days, guys would say, "Don't change nothing—make the same thing all the time." And a customer would smoke, say, Te-Amo Meditation all the time. Now you need to have new products. Now if you go to the cigar shop, you see one person buying different brands and different sizes. They like new cigars.
Q: Speaking of new cigars, tell me about what we're smoking now.
Alejandro Turrent: It's A. Turrent 6 Generations. A Mexican puro. We started with Criollo wrapper, but we decided after being on the road and smoking different kinds of cigars, we came back and we changed the whole thing and used Corojo wrapper. We went back and used tobacco from '98 and '99.
Q: The seed?
Alejandro Turrent: No, the crop.
Alberto Turrent: The filler is 10 years old. It will be a very limited edition—we don't have a lot of it. To keep 10 years [of] tobacco and use that inventory, you must be a stockholder in the Bank of England. [Laughs.]
Alejandro Turrent: The '98-'99 crop, there will only be enough for 50,000 cigars. And for '99-2000, maybe 20,000 cigars.
Alberto Turrent: We will try to keep some bales. We're going to try to always keep it with 10-year-old tobacco.
Q: Tell me about the wrapper—you don't grow a lot of Corojo in Mexico, do you? Is this primed, or stalk-cut?
Alberto Turrent: Primed.
Q: Shade or sun-grown?
Alberto Turrent: Sun-grown.
Q: So this is your big thing for this year.
Alejandro Turrent: It's a little more full bodied.
Q: Does this cigar have a little bit of every tobacco you grow?
Alejandro Turrent: Yes. And soon we will have a version of A. Turrent 6 Generations with maduro wrapper.
Q: And how old will that wrapper be?
Alejandro Turrent: Again, I think about 10 years. But as we were looking for some
tobacco, we found two bales, three bales. That will be very, very limited.
Alberto Turrent: It's an accident, to have all this old tobacco. Normally we ship to customers by containers. For maduro, a full container holds 120 bales. Maybe at the end of the crop, we produce 150 bales. So we can't ship 30, and we keep it. Then we looked at inventory, and we said, "Wow." Really, it was an accident.
Q: That's a happy accident. What's your favorite size cigar to smoke?
Alberto Turrent: Most of the time, I like robustos. I cannot smoke the big ones. The Churchill is too long—I love the robustos.
Q: And you?
Alejandro Turrent: 48 by 5—a robusto.
Alberto Turrent: I smoke all the cigars to taste them—but when I smoke for pleasure, I smoke robustos. When I go to a restaurant, and I don't have too much time, I might smoke a corona size.
Q: What is special about the tobacco grown in Mexico? What are some of the defining characteristics?
Alberto Turrent: It's sweet. It's very good for blending. It's not very dominant, the Criollo. And I think the Havana-seed tobacco is also very sweet.
Q: What about the soil?
Alberto Turrent: It's very rich, volcanic soil.
Q: Do you have to use a lot of fertilizer?
Alberto Turrent: We use beans, legumes. It's a special bean that we grow on the land—60 tons of green material. We plow that in, for natural fertilizer. Organic material.
Q: How many acres of land do you grow on in San Andrés?
Alberto Turrent: All San Andrés? It's about 2,000 acres. That includes wrappers and fillers. And it was double in the boom [during the mid-1990s].
Q: And you're the biggest growers of cigar
tobacco in Mexico?
Alberto Turrent: Yes.
Q: What else should our readers know about your cigars and your tobacco that they don't know already?
Alejandro Turrent: We are vertically integrated, keeping the control from the tobacco in the fields to the end of the process. Now we are trying to grow each seed according to soil that is better for it. Also, selecting different cuts, different primings, and separating each leaf. Back when we only made Te-Amo, the blend was not a big secret—it was light tobacco, dark tobacco, Sumatra wrapper, and some sizes dark binder, others light binder—that was it. Now we have four different blends, different types of tobaccos, different years . . .
Alberto Turrent: And we have very good maduro wrappers.
Q: So Alejandro, you're the sixth-generation Turrent to grow tobacco?
Alejandro Turrent: No, my son is.
Q: How old is he?
Alejandro Turrent: Almost two. [He turned two in October.]
Q: And what's his name?
Alejandro Turrent: Alejandro.
Q: I know he's young, but I'm willing to bet that he enters the cigar business.
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