Posted: 04:13 PM ET, 03/05/08I’ve just arrived in Santiago for the first annual ProCigar Festival. This has been a long time coming, and I’m happy to be here. Cuba has had its cigar festival for more than a decade now, so why not a similar one in the Dominican Republic?
ProCigar is an association of leading Dominican cigarmakers. Read more
Posted: 11:07 AM ET, 03/05/08My friend, Tom Unvert, laughed and said “don’t worry about it buddy. Just get here in one piece for the party.”
But it did suck. I had 19 very nice cigars in my courier bag, including a five-pack selection of torpedos for Tom’s birthday present. Read more
Posted: 11:05 AM ET, 03/03/08The massive room at the Pabexpo in the chic Havana neighborhood of Siboney was already thick with smoke within the first 30 minutes of the gala dinner on Friday during the 10th annual Festival del Habano. The thousand or so participants were either smoking the Trinidad Reyes handed out at the door by a line of gorgeous Cuban women, or their own stash. Read more
Posted: 03:43 PM ET, 02/29/08I had planned to hit up some of the key cigar shops this morning, like Partagas and Club Havana. This is where a lot of action happens during the festival. People just hang out, talk and smoke. It’s a good way to get information. Many people simply come to Havana for the festival to do that, they never attend the official events. Read more
Posted: 04:28 PM ET, 02/28/08It was all about taste yesterday in Havana. I attended two tastings. One was a smoker in the El Laguito factory, the home of Cohiba cigars, and another was a tasting in the evening at the Nacional Hotel that I led promoting the idea of drinking Champagne while smoking cigars. Read more
Posted: 02:04 PM ET, 02/27/08Sometimes I find it almost hard to believe that the cigars we buy in shops come from the rollers’ tables of cigar factories in Havana. When we buy the cigar, it’s almost as if we are standing right next to the roller and he or she is handing us the cigar. Read more
Posted: 03:00 PM ET, 02/26/08I just got back from visiting the H. Upmann factory in Nuevo Vedado with some friends from Geneva, Switzerland. The main hermano was Arek Aboulian, whose family owns Raffi Cigars. The twenty-something spent three months working in Upmann a short while ago, and he knows just about everyone in the factory. Read more
Posted: 09:22 AM ET, 02/26/08Just got back from the South Beach Food & Wine Festival in Miami. There was some golf involved, but I won’t rub it in too much.
Here are few random observations.
I attended a cocktail reception before a dinner on Wednesday night for many of the Miami-based cigar manufacturers who were in town last week. Read more
Posted: 04:04 PM ET, 02/25/08I woke up this morning in Havana in my hotel, the Melia Cohiba, and after a quick café con leche in the bar, I walked out onto the Malecon boulevard that skirts the sea in front of the city, and breathed the fresh sea air with a mixture of diesel and other smells of a bustling city. Read more
Posted: 11:27 AM ET, 02/21/08Baseball is king in the Dominican Republic, so when the Cigar Family Charitable Foundation created a school for the impoverished children around the Chateau de la Fuente tobacco plantation it was only natural to include a baseball field. But baseball fields cost money, and there was only so much to go around, and other, more pressing projects meant the field and the children’s fun had to wait. Read more
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