 At War in the Connecticut Valley (continued) 
There’s something desolate and vaguely unsettling about acres of post-harvest tobacco land; the wooden posts and wires that a few months ago were draped with hanging leaves now lie bare. The fields had the look of a long stretch of World War I trenches, now more Giorgio DeChiricho than Norman Rockwell. As the Enfield Shade company truck rolled past the fallow fields, I asked Chickosky if his expectations were met this year. With conviction, he responded, “We’re cautiously optimistic about profitability. It was a tough year. The tobacco we saved is beautiful, but the tobacco we left in the field was a significant percentage, maybe 20 percent. You’re definitely looking at profit margins being affected.” I glanced out the window at a view that, as if to illustrate Marion Nielsen’s predictions, featured a stretch of what was once tobacco farmland - now with acre upon acre of young Christmas trees sprouting up from the cold soil.
From here, the tobacco “hands” - bundled pairs of 22 selected leaves - get packed into wooden cases lined with waxed paper, then repacked into cardboard shipping cartons to go off to the Windsor Shade Tobacco Company for the “sweating,” or fermentation process. This step, as Chickosky put it, is “to kill the bad bacteria that’ll make it spoil, promote the good bacteria that’ll start the fermentation, and preserve [the leaves] for the ocean voyage down to the Dominican Republic.”
So how long would it be until the leaf bundle in my hand was wrapped around some nice Montecristos or H. Upmanns? “Two to three years.” Chickosky said. “It’s got a long way to go from here.” Cigar making, as always, has proven to be a business of patience, though one of practicality as well. At Chickosky’s urging, I handled a leaf on the workmen’s table. It was the color of goldenrod, with a silky, yet pliable feel, and thin, cheese-cloth-like consistency. Then I noticed a small discoloration. “That’s a bud rot,” Chickosky pointed out immediately, “and it’ll be sectioned out. They’ll get a wrapper cut on the good side, and then this side of the leaf will end up going for chew or pipe tobacco. They’ll use every bit of the leaf. From a big one, you can sometimes get up to four wrappers.” A brief stroll in the chilly morning air took us to the warehouse - another den of steamy humidity with a thick, sweet, tobacco aroma that hung heavy on the air. Here is where a crew of 14 workers packs up the tobacco in crates to send it off to its next destination. As had become common during the day, Chickosky explained details while Reuland excitedly asked questions. We met Aubrey Minor, Enfield’s general manager, who told us, while opening up a tightly-packed carton of leaf, “There’s 112 pounds in each carton. The crew does about 50 of these cartons a day. At Windsor Shade, it gets sweated right in the carton. This will never come out of the carton until it gets down to the islands to get sorted.”
Getting back on the road, our guest from Indonesia started giving us a glimpse of a bigger - perhaps brighter - picture. He revealed that despite the problems facing shade farmers in America, and despite the leveling off of the domestic premium cigar market, smokers in the rest of the world have begun to discover the unique qualities of Connecticut shade, and tobacco farmers in other parts of the world are taking steps to duplicate the growing process. This was the mission that had brought Jean-Paul Reuland to Enfield on this brisk, sunny morning. “Demand for Connecticut Shade is climbing in Indonesia,” Reuland said. “Consumption of cigars has been up for the past five years, and we had a relatively good crop this year.” Reuland is quick to note the curious, full-circle irony, as the Connecticut shade-growing process began as an experiment to duplicate the Sumatran wrapper coming from Indonesia in the late 1800s. “It all started with Sumatra” he proclaimed. And more specifically, it all started with the Cullman family.
It’s a mystery,” Edgar Cullman Sr. said, with the wide-eyed wistfulness of youth, “like the treasure of the Sierra Madre. Who can understand it? We’ve tried growing it in every tobacco-producing state - Wisconsin, Virginia, the Carolinas, Florida - and it never tastes the same. It’s like Havana tobacco - you instantly recognize it, and nothing else is like it. Or like wine made in a certain area of France, tasting different from the one made right across the street.”Trying, once more, I had to pin down what was special about the Connecticut River Valley, and decided to visit the posh Manhattan offices of General Cigar Company, to speak with one of the authorities on the subject. The CEO of General Cigar Company, producers of Macanudo, Partagas, Punch, and others, Cullman is currently the patriarch of what can legitimately be called a tobacco dynasty. His father, Joseph, Jr., was in fact one of the pioneers of Connecticut tobacco growing. Cullman has the bearing of a classic gentleman and the accumulated knowledge of an elder statesman. He is slight of build and white-haired, with a voice immediately soft-spoken and commanding at the same time. He also has a knack for spinning a yarn, giving me a personal tour through the origins of Connecticut shade. “In 1904, when my father graduated college, there were more cigars being smoked in America than cigarettes, and they all had to be made by hand. There was a big market for cigar tobacco, and a lot of interest in Indonesia, where Sumatran wrapper was grown. It was sold in Amsterdam, at a big auction once a year. My father would go out on a boat, and come back with wrapper tobacco that he would then re-sell to manufacturers. In 1906, Dad started growing his own Connecticut shade wrapper, starting off with Cuban seed. Cigars were peaking in America in the 1920s and 1930s. I came into the business after World War II, and Dad said if I wanted to be in the business, I’d have to learn to make cigars as well as grow tobacco.” From there, Edgar Cullman spearheaded the acquisition of General Cigar, whose output at the time consisted of popular machine-made brands such as White Owl and El Producto. Then the Cuban Embargo in 1960 changed the face of the cigar industry, creating an unexpected opportunity for the enterprising Cullmans.
“We had never made a premium cigar. With the Cuban ban, Ramon Cifuentes [inventor of Partagas cigars] was exiled from Cuba to the U.S. He taught me and our people how to make premium cigars. And that was the beginning of Macanudo.” I asked Cullman about the immediate future of Connecticut shade, and how this year’s tainted crop would help determine it, and his voice took on a more concerned tone. “I think the demand for Connecticut Shade is still very strong,” he said. “I think there was an overstimulation of the market in recent years, and now there’s a bit of indigestion that has to work its way out. The past few years, there’s been an oversupply of shade leaf, plus we’ve had two bouts with Blue Mold, which has been disastrous for the growers.” And what exactly is Blue Mold? “It’s a fungus that leaves a round [discoloration] on the leaf that broadens out and eventually makes a hole in the leaf. The leaf becomes tender; you can’t stretch it enough for cigar making. The tobacco as a result isn’t sound, isn’t even worth harvesting. A lot of tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley this year has been simply turned under because of the Blue Mold. It’s been very serious. About 50 percent of the broadleaf had to be plowed under. I see a shortage of broadleaf next year, and a shortage of shade tobacco within the next two years. Those that don’t have inventories are going to have some real problems meeting the demand.”
The biggest nemesis we face is the Blue Mold,” Ken Chick-osky confirmed, driving the truck back toward the Enfield Shade main office and the end of our tour, in response to a query from Reuland. “It hadn’t been seen in the Valley for 20 years before (this latest outbreak). I’ve been to several seminars, and the general consensus is that the Blue Mold that we get in the United States - which moves into Florida and works its way up - all originates out of Cuba.” I was taken slightly aback at the theory - Reuland noted that the Blue Mold was first reported in Cuba - mulling over the idea that the battle being waged in the Valley had taken on a more ominous, international tone, and was perhaps larger than I imagined. “It’s just another reason we hope that U.S. relations with Cuba normalize,” Chickosky said. “So we can send some of our own experts down there to try and stabilize the situation. If we can stop the Blue Mold in Cuba, we feel like we can get control of it in the United States.” Spoken like a true general. The midday sun was warm on our backs as we stepped out of the truck, and stood outside in a circle to finish our cigars. Reuland told a story of a woman who was visiting a tobacco farm and stayed overnight in a guest house outside the fields of freshly planted leaf. Unaware of the fast-growing nature of the tobacco plant, she lay awake all night hearing noises from outside and inquired of the farm’s owner what the racket was. He incredulously replied, “Why, it was the tobacco growing, of course!” Another one of those mysteries, I could imagine Edgar Cullman, Sr. or Henkie Kelner saying. We all had a laugh. The breeze was getting brisk, but the sun shone through. The harvest was a memory, but the work in the sheds, warehouses, and curing barns was proceeding apace. The battle was still uphill, but the war was being won. And in this moment the Valley felt truly at peace. SMOKE - Winter 2000/01   |
We pulled up to the curing barn, where I was anxious to see the actual work of preparing the tobacco leaves for the next step on their journey to becoming cigars. Though the harvest was over and the fields were empty, the curing barn was still a beehive of activity. Giant bundles of tobacco leaves hung from the high ceiling and lay across tables, as migrant workers plied their trade, seemingly comfortable in the stifling 70-80 degree heat in the barn’s interior. I wiped my brow and realized I was no longer inhabiting a painting. I was now, quite literally, trudging around inside a giant humidor.
“This tobacco has been cured,” Chickosky explained, handing me a moist string of leaves. “We’ve wrapped the sheds with plastic, we’ve introduced moisture into the leaves to make them pliable, and this is essentially how they’re going to stay forever. The leaves are being looked over, and if there’s anything we don’t want in there, we’ll throw it out.”
These steps are just the preliminaries in the painstaking, multi-layered process that is the birth of a pristine Connecticut shade wrapper. Chickosky explained, “It’s still got to go through sweat, fermentation, sorting, and sizing of each individual leaf into grades. Then it gets baled, and finally, aged.”
I asked Minor how long he’s been doing this. “About 40 years,” was his response, with a smile. I confess I was expecting that answer when I asked. After just one day here in the trenches, I’d started getting to know the look of a veteran of the Tobacco Wars. 
“Until after the embargo,” Cullman mused, “there really were no high-priced cigars in the United States. When we [the Cullman family] took control of General in 1961, it was making about eight-and-a-half billion cigars, right here in the U.S. The number of imported Havana cigars was much lower, maybe 50 million. People liked mild cigars. We became one of the largest growers of wrapper tobacco in the state, and shade became the wrapper of choice for almost all cigars - about ten billion.