RHODES: Victor Sinclair is a Dominican and American partnership. It started as a Dominican company, which I bought three years ago. Jose Dominguez and his family run the factory in the Dominican Republic. The story of the fighting cock - whose name is Harry - is really about Jose's father, and how he earned a fair bit of money speculating on cockfights. That's how he actually bought the property that the factory is on. Harry won 19 fights in a row, and Jose's father bet everything he had on him, about 18 times, and made unbelievable amounts of money. They used to bring in roosters from Spain and all over the world to fight this cock, but it always won. As legend has it, Jose started this company with that money.

SMOKE: Where does the name Victor Sinclair come from? Is it from an actual person?

RHODES: No, it's a fictitious name. The previous owners spent a lot of time working on something that sounded like a distinguished, old-time British name. They really liked it, so we stuck with it.

SMOKE: What were you doing before you got into the cigar business?

RHODES: Basically, as far as cigars go, I was a consumer. I have a background in finance, and was doing financial consulting when I realized that the world of investing as we knew it then was crazy. So I took all of my money out of the investments I had, and put it into cigars. A few years later, I would argue that we have the best collection of boutique tobacco of any company of our size. We have millions of dollars worth of tobacco in our warehouses, and just bought up a whole other city block behind our factory to build more.

SMOKE: As an investor following the cigar business, did you foresee the booming market that it eventually became?

RHODES: Quite the contrary! I didn't get into it until the boom had busted. I didn't get in until I was pretty confident that there was no new money that was going to be put into the cigar business. Therefore, anyone who did have access to capital could do a lot of interesting things. And that's exactly what we've done. We embarked on a campaign of exclusivity and of superior blending. We've got an exclusive, global contract on our red Brazilian corojo; we've got Connecticut farmers under contract so we've got our own broadleaf, as well as a new Cuban-seed grown there just for us. Juan Sanchez, our master blender, has been in this business all his life. We asked him what he needed and he said 'tobaccos from all over the world,' so that's what we got him.

SMOKE: Do you grow any of your own tobacco in the Dominican Republic?

RHODES: We own one factory and one farm. But we control five other farms under a contract, because we finance them and buy their crops. We use a majority of Dominican tobacco, but we thought the American smoker was looking for something interesting and new. We're one of the only companies I know that uses Cameroon as filler, for example. We've got tobacco from Italian Tuscany that we use as an alternative to Nicaraguan ligero, which is quite strong and flavorful. We have tobacco from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Indonesia, and a number of African countries. Now we're starting to see more African tobaccos introduced in the market. As for our Connecticut Havana seed, if you look at the history of Connecticut tobacco, Havana seed was the only tobacco grown there until about the mid-1800's. Around that time, many of the farmers moved to broadleaf because the yield was better. Only a few farmers continued to grow Havana seed, and we have one of them under contract. At this year's RTDA (Retail Tobacco Dealers of America) trade show, we're going to introduce some new cigars keeping that tradition alive. There's not much of this wrapper around; I think it's just us and Excalibur's new Dark Knight cigar that are using it.

SMOKE: What new products have been launched since you've come to the company?

RHODES: The first new product we launched was the Bohemian line, which has been a huge success for us. We introduced the Vintage Select Box-press. We were one of the first to really push Brazilian Aripadaca, which is now quite popular on C.A.O.'s Brazilia line, as a wrapper. We went with much larger ring gauges on most of our cigars, which others are now doing, too.

SMOKE: Did you predict the consumer leaning toward those larger ring gauge cigars before others did?

RHODES: I don't know if we foresaw it; we just took a chance. Perdomo did have the Inmenso out, with a 70 ring gauge, but that was kind of a one-off. We were in the forefront of bringing 50-, 60-, and 70-ring gauge cigars into the mainstream. I'm not trying to overplay our hand other than to say that we were out there taking risks. That's what we really see our job as being. For example, our packaging is really designed to stay in circulation forever. You've seen our Bohemian Revolution cigars in the "ammo can." That's an expression of what we want. Those are travel humidors; they're not going to be turned into purses.

SMOKE: What was the thinking behind the Bohemian Revolution's "dos capa" (double wrapper)?

RHODES: That was really the brainchild of Anthony Christopher, who's affiliated with our company. He had been arguing that we should try this for a long time. We had all these different wrapper tobaccos available to us, so we thought "Why not?" So we started blending, developed a stable line of filler, and then just started swapping out the wrappers. We found that if you put Connecticut over Cameroon it tasted one way, and if you reversed it, it tasted completely different. It really is fascinating. We must have done about 40 blends. We settled on four for the launch.

SMOKE: Why would the double wrapper make the cigars taste so different than a single one?

RHODES: Clearly, it has to do with the fact that there's more tobacco in the cigar. You can look at it as having two wrappers or two binders. Either way, you're changing the nature of the smoke. I'm not enough of a student of the sciences to articulate exactly why that is. To be honest with you, that particular product is going to take a little bit of time, because consumers are just getting acquainted with it.

SMOKE: Anything else out there new and exciting that you're trying?

RHODES: Well, I think the dos capa has a lot of legs, and we're going to stick with that. We're always going to continue to try different and unique blends. In terms of new things, we have a cigar that we'll be releasing at the RTDA that we're calling Bohemian Bamboo. What we're doing with this is extending the Bohemian line to include a version with a Connecticut shade-grown wrapper. It looks very much like a stalk of bamboo.

SMOKE: Have you tried one of those yourself?

RHODES: Yeah, and it tastes awesome! We're proud that we've never launched "just another cigar" into the market. Everything we've launched has been unorthodox. The most orthodox thing we did was the Vintage Select Box-Press. The Bohemian looks very unorthodox, packed in a bed of tobacco with its Brazilian wrapper. But once you cut it and light it, it smokes like a classic cigar. The "Bohemian" name is kind of a literary take-off. We all want to live the Bohemian life, and it's sort of an invitation to that. The names of the cigar frontmarks all refer to prominent bohemian people and places. For example, there are Big Sur and North Beach. North Beach is where Jack Kerouac and the "beat generation" hung out in San Francisco. Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsburg were important beat generation writers. And of course, everyone knows Greenwich Village.

For us, the product has to be edgy. We've pushed the envelope on wrapper with the Corojo. It's not a perfectly uniform-colored wrapper like in a Davidoff, for example. You'll have a little more color variation that you would get in your normal box of cigars, but you'll also be getting a lot of flavor and spice. We're assuming that the people who are smoking cigars now are serious cigar lovers. The "novelty guy" is gone.

SMOKE: What do you see for the cigar market as a whole? Do you see it trending upward?

RHODES: For our company, at least, it's been a skyrocket upward! Our sales are up substantially over the last three years.

SMOKE: Do you think we'll ever see a period again like the mid-to-late 1990s?

RHODES: I do, but I don't think it will be the same. I think cigar makers will continue to have to be creative and innovative to keep the consumers' interest. I think the opening up of Cuba would be a great thing, because it will spark a huge interest in cigar smoking again, and I'm confident that all our cigars can compete very well with anything coming out of Cuba.

SMOKE: Would you be one of the people interested in blending Cuban tobacco with others, when and if it becomes legal?

RHODES: We're already doing it. We just can't sell those cigars in the United States. It's being done by a lot of people, but they're not talking about it very much.

SMOKE: Is it be good to be known as the company that tries unorthodox ideas?