Tradition is fine, more than fine. But it is not a necessity to produce a wonderful cigar. It's not like Mexico had a truly glowing reputation for cigars anyway, so why attempt to rest on laurels that aren't there? Pedraza lays it out. "What kind of position in the market can you expect for the Mexican cigar when, for 50 years, there was only one Mexican brand in the U.S., and it was low-priced? We don't need that tradition; we've got commitment, we've
got quality people, and we control all the stages of the product, from the seed to the cigar."
And control they do, under the watchful eyes of managers who are used to professional large-scale cigarette operations. The care is evident in the efficiencies in the fields and the factory; the irrigation systems and high-quality barns; the clean, modern factory. And they have their experts: there is Santiago VaIdes, who has vast experience running cigarette factories for CLM and knows what makes for smooth operations; and there is Pablo Migueles, who has been in the cigar industry since age 9, and now personally attends to the production of every Cruz Real cigar. Cruz Real has brought together a number of traditions to make their own image of the Mexican cigar.Cruz Real is also well on the way to surmounting the obstacles that have hindered their market penetration in the U.S. In spite of sending 2.5 million cigars a year to the States, the current factory's production potential is four times that. "Our biggest obstacle," says Pedraza, "has been distribution in the U.S." After recently penning a new distribution deal with Miami Cigar, a well-established U.S.-based distributor with a stable of excellent brands, Pedraza created an additional retailer-support program designed to heighten the presence of Cruz Real. These moves should end the distribution woes for the company. Internationally, the might of BAT is now working in Cruz Real's favor, as their giant patron has committed to placing the brand in numerous world markets. For this new tradition, the magic starts in the lumpy loam of the valley, and ends at a retailer near you.
As I left Cruz Real and drove through the town, I was struck by something beyond an apparently preternatural love of speed bumps: the large number of dark and shuttered buildings whose painted signs proclaim them as former cigar factories. The market adjustment that the U.S. has experienced in the past year has cleaned this town of a lot of chaff. The Survivors are the more dependable future - and often the past - of the Mexican cigar.
Headquartered in a weighty gated and guarded building is one such survivor, and an icon of the Mexican cigar industry, Nueva Matacapan Tabacos. This massive factory, better known as Te-Amo, continues to churn out
600,000 cigars a month, after 35 successful years. Alberto Turrent, a solid and pleasantly weathered man, is the fifth generation of family tobacco men, and has been sole owner of Te-Amo since 1994. TeAmo, like Cruz Real, grows their own tobacco, and even after their vast cigar production (95". of which goes to the U.S., and all of that to massive Consolidated Cigar), their growing is impressive enough to afford them the status of one of Mexico's largest exporters of raw tobacco.
Te-Amo's operation is impressive. Winding from broad room to room, I found myself enveloped by the factory, from rollers, to bailers, to sorters, to vast spaces stacked with boxes or bundles or packs of tobacco. The aroma is sweet and the pace is determined, and the cigar emerging from this labor has won the distinction of best-known Mexican offering. Te-Amo has also been known, for many years, as a cheap cigar. Turrent explains that easily: "Our tobacco is inexpensive to produce and our labor costs are low, and our cigar is soft and sweet - you cannot notice any difference with other cigars that would be worth what you have to pay." Or, another way to look at it, says Turrent, "It is not that we keep our cigar priced so low, it is that others price theirs too high.”
This logic aside, Turrent has acknowledged the Mexican label's need for an improved image. To that end, Te-Amo launched a new brand last year, the Excelsior, targeted at a premium market. "We did this to demonstrate to others that the people of Mexico can make a cigar good enough to compete with the higher-priced market." While demand for the Excelsior is high, perhaps proving Turrent's point, the stunning success, cheap cigar or not, of the Te-Amo label is no accident. Smokers like the cigar.
Located a short walk from Te-Amo's factory is the less formal Puros Santa Clara, an unassuming operation attached to a retail shop selling cigars and souvenirs. Jorge Ortiz, president of Santa Clara, hails from six generations of cigar makers; his dedication to the history of the business is displayed in the artifacts spread around his clean, modern office. A quiet man initially, Ortiz displays a subtle charm and intensity that conveys his passion for this industry Standing in front of a framed 1905 map of San Andres, Ortiz points out the ads for the tobacco-growing families of the valley which ring the poster. Many of these families are his relatives, but he won't make any specific claims, since contention remains among the major valley families regarding who is truly responsible for the tobacco tradition. Regardless, it is clearly in Ortiz's blood.
Ortiz has been running the Santa Clara factory for 30 years, though his involvement with tobacco goes back to a time when, as a boy of six, he was responsible for picking worms off the plants of the family fields. The company manufactures two main brands, Aromas de San Andres, which is sold to Villazon, and Santa Clara 1830, made for Lew Rothman of J.R. Cigars. The Santa Clara 1830 brand is Ortiz's monument to the beginning of tobacco in the valley, as the first plantings trace back to a cooperative Dutch-German experiment in the area. Though the Europeans, and many more recent competitors, are long gone, Ortiz continues to maintain Santa Clara as one of the premier Mexican producers.
A friend of Rothman's for 20 years, Ortiz has dedicated most of his production (which has ranged from 10,000 to 30,000 cigars a day) to that relationship. "During the boom," Ortiz remembers, "Lew always said he would take everything I could make." This kept Ortiz out of the seductively risky private-label market of the cigar boom's peak. His daughter, however, he relates with a smile, collected every card he ever received asking for private-label cigars, and has opened her own factory as the private label specialist. Just a short distance from Ortiz's factory, she and her husband operate Tabacos La Victoria, and the competition, if there is any, is friendly.
Thus it is that a few cigar makers continue to promote the special valley, home of San Andres Negro tobacco, to cigar smokers eager for more. Though the dizzying demand of the boom has abated, Mexico seems poised for a bit of a renaissance in its cigar industry. Reputations are being remade, manufacturers are being discovered by a new market of smokers, and those most capable of carrying the torch further are doing so. The Mexican cigar market is beginning to move in new directions, thanks to entrepreneurs like Elie Akkad and his Mexico City-based Artigas brand, which has become a favorite of the elite class of Mexican cigar smokers. As consumers, we can look to that sweeping border to the south and imagine hordes of quality cigars pouring over it and into our waiting humidors. Because the cigars, mi dios, they are good. And it will be the most welcome invasion of our short history.
