Bill Sr. recalls. "Everybody was trying any tobacco they could get their hands on. The tobacco merchants would send samples, and I smoked and smoked and smoked until I turned purple. The tobacco that we ended up with made cigars that were milder than what we had been making with the Cuban filler we had used up until then."
The embargo made it necessary for Finck to forge new relationships with non-Cuban growers to insure that other tobacco would be available.
"We've always been very careful to maintain a source of tobacco supply. Sometimes it's been difficult, but we grew and we're still here in the cigar business." Chuckling, Bill Sr. adds: "We're too dumb to quit."
"The best cigars coming out of Cuba now don't match up to pre-embargo days," Bill Sr. offers. "In the Cuban heyday, they had a lot of tobacco -- some was good, some was OK and a lot of it was terrible. You had to be careful what you bought, but you could find good tobacco and good cigars. Today, about 90% of the Cuban cigars I've smoked have been very disappointing. I don't think they cure the tobacco very well."
Bill Sr. says that the 20 years' experience that growers in the Dominican Republic and Honduras have with Cuban-seed tobacco is paying off with some excellent crops.
"Cuban-seed tobacco in the Dominican Republic has its own taste and Cuban-seed tobacco from Honduras has its own -- they are not the same. The Cuban-seed tobacco they are growing in both countries now is pretty uniform in taste and they get a good burn on it. It's got some characteristics of Cuban tobacco that their native tobaccos don't have."
Finck Cigar Co.'s most recognized cigar is the Travis Club -- a line of 11 all-tobacco machine-made cigars, two of which are a long-filler, short-filler combination that sell for between 60 cents and 75 cents each. The other nine varieties are short filler. The Travis Club Premium line, which recently became available nationally, consists of six sizes -- all machine-made long-filler featuring Cuban-seed Dominican and Brazilian tobaccos wrapped in a Connecticut-shade leaf with a Connecticut broadleaf binder. Prices range from $1.70 for the Palma to $2.60 for the Churchill.
The Travis Club is named for an early 20th century social club in honor of Col. William Travis that Henry William Finck contracted to make cigars for. "We have the No. 1 cigar in Texas in the Travis Club Senator," Bill Jr. says. The Senator is 5-3/16 inches long with a 52-ring gauge and is one of Finck Cigar's short-filler/long-filler combinations.
The Travis Club Premium line has been in limited production until recently. "We've made just a few Travis Club Premium for 15 or 20 years, and we've sold them only in Texas. We decided to get serious about distributing them last spring. The demand has been huge," Bill Jr. says.
Bill Jr. says that nearly as much labor goes into manufacturing a machine-made
cigar as goes into a hand rolled cigar. The primary difference, he says, is the time
that it takes to roll the cigar. "It can take up to four people to make a machine-made cigar," Bill Jr. says. "There is a tremendous amount of hand work."
Both father and son are involved in selecting and buying the tobacco that goes in to Finck cigars. "We've used some of the same farms for years," Bill Jr. says. "My dad understands how to make cigars properly and how to make them without sacrificing the quality."
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