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The tradition of cigar smoking in Mexico has roots that go back before the Spanish conquest, five centuries ago. The historical monuments and cliff paintings of the Mayan Indians frequently depict their priests and gods smoking tobacco leaves rolled into long tubes – the prototype of the modern cigar. The gods smoked cigars and blew out rolling clouds of smoke, which the ancient Mayans believed was the reason for clouds in the sky; falling stars, they thought, were their thrown-away cigar butts.
The founder of the dynasty that owns Nueva Matacapan Tabacos was Alberto Turrent I, a Spaniard who left his native country in 1880. He first went to Cuba in search of work and got taken on by a local plantation, where he began to learn the secrets of tobacco growing. Some time later, a distant relative in Mexico who also grew tobacco invited him over. His experience in Cuba helped Alberto Turrent make a successful career, and soon he was considered one of the greatest tobacco specialists in Mexico. Tobacco growing became a family business, and another two generations of Turrents were to continue it.
It was not until the 20th century that Alberto Turrent III changed the company’s main line of business and introduced the manufacture of cigars alongside tobacco growing. Today the family company Nueva Matacapan Tabacos is the largest producer in this field in Mexico.
Our questions were answered by the youngest member of the family, Alejandro Turrent V.
In your family there has been a tradition of calling all the boys ‘Alberto’. Your grandfather was Alberto III and your father Alberto IV. But for some reason you were called Alejandro... The tradition was ended by my mother. When I was born my grandfather was Alberto, so my father was known as Alberto Petito (Little Alberto). My mother said quite definitely: ‘I don’t want my son to be called Alberto Petito Petito!’ So I was called Alejandro.
Now they call you Alejandro I. But what are you going to call your son? Alejandro (after yourself) or Alberto (in the family tradition)? It’s not a question that concerns me much at the moment, since I’ve no children and I’m only planning to get married. Most likely, that will happen this winter, in a few months time. And then, when I have a son, I’ll decide what name to give him. In any event, I hope he won’t break with the family tradition and will continue the family business.
You mean the cigar business? For almost a hundred years our family has done nothing else but grow tobacco, and we have learned to do it very well. Our products are enormously successful in Europe, particularly in Germany. Only the two world wars – at the beginning and in the middle of the 20th century – slightly affected our positions. Then we started to make cigars. In 1963 our Te-Amo line was started.
Don’t you produce another brand, A.Turrent, which actually came out earlier? Yes. It was created by Alberto Turrent II back in 1910. But these cigars were not available in the shops – they were for friends, relatives and clients. In those days the brand A. Turrent was not widely known. We only started exporting in 1964, and the first shipments of Te-Amo went to New York. It turned out to be the right place at the right time: America’s largest cigar-smoking city was looking urgently for a replacement for Cuban cigars which had recently been embargoed. Our inexpensive quality cigars soon found a niche in the market. I was told that the New York cigar shops managed to survive during the 1970s largely due to Te-Amo. Retail traders at the time wouldn’t dream of selling a fourdollar cigar for eight dollars and making a 100% profit, as they do today. Some traders would even sell them at cost, hoping to profit from the sale of other goods in the shop. But on Te-Amo cigars the New York retailers got a regular 20% profit, which was unheard of at the time.
And that was due to your father? Primarily yes, I would say. He has worked with tobacco since the age of eighteen. At thirty, he became head of the Matacapan Company. Those were strange times: the company frequently changed its name, and our family frequently changed its partners and shareholders. It wasn’t until 1970 that the company passed fully and completely into the hands of our family, as did the Te-Amo brand.
Your father has run the company for more than thirty years. Is he still coping?Or is it time for you to replace him?
I’ll say he’s coping! Although running such an empire is no joke. My father believes that he has to be in permanent contact with his managers, so the daily meetings in the office have been replaced by a system of radio communication – all employees occupying more or less top jobs are equipped with two-way radios.
The Patriarch’s day – they call my father ‘the Patriarch’ in the company – begins at seven in the morning with a two-hour discussion on the radio. After breakfast, which consists of fresh fruit, the discussions are continued for another hour. The rest of the day he spends going round the factories and the plantations. Although his business activity is extremely varied, Alberto Turrent IV remains at heart primarily a farmer.
Patriarch Alberto IV prepares for a shift. At some point in the future the Nueva Matacapan Tabacos
Company will be run by Alejandro I
What are your duties in the company?
I run the department of national and international marketing. I graduated from university in two specialities: international business and agriculture. So I know my way around the subtleties of marketing and the nuances of growing tobacco. My pride and joy is the Habana 2000 tobacco, which has been grown from Cuban seeds in our plantations in the San-Andres Valley. For three years we experimented with this type of tobacco and finally obtained excellent results. In size these leaves resemble the Sumatran, except that they are darker, and they have a particular strength and aroma.
You know, we have amazingly fertile soil here. I show all our guests the hedges that line the highway from Veracruz to San Andres. Then again – and this is something you won’t believe, if you’ve never seen it – if you knock a piece of wood into the ground as a post for a fence, in four months it will be covered with leaves, and in a few years it will be a tree again.
Do you only use the tobacco in your cigars that you grow yourselves, or do you also buy it from other farmers? Who knows what type of tobacco our cigars need better than we do ourselves? Of course, we only use our own tobacco. On our own plantations – which, incidentally, cover an area of 700 hectares – we can control the whole process from planting the seeds to the final fermentation. If we bought tobacco from other farmers, we could never be 100% sure of its quality.
But your cigars contain not only Mexican tobacco. That’s right. In recent years, we have been able to buy tobacco abroad. Up until 1996 there were strict controls on the import of foreign tobaccos, which were aimed at boosting national industry, and all cigars produced here – from the filling to the wrapper leaf – were 100% Mexican. And that includes the original Te-Amo. Of course, it was hard for them to compete with the rich taste and bouquet of cigars that had been made, say, in the Dominican Republic or Honduras, where tobacco from four or five countries might be found in a single cigar. But now we buy tobacco from Connecticut, Nicaragua, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and several other places. Only small amounts though, because the import duties are set at an inordinately high 45%.
But the result, as we say in Russian, was not long in coming. Quite true. We created a Mexican cigar that was decidedly different from those that used to be made here before – the Te- Amo Anniversario. It has a dark, oily wrapper leaf made from the Habana 2000 tobacco that we spent three years over, and the filling is a mixture of Nicaraguan Negro San Andres and Dominican Piloto Cubano Domingo, to which we add a pinch of our own Mexican Habana 2000. The binder leaf is Nicaraguan Negro San Andres.
How do you go about creating new cigars and the recipes for them? First, we think about the market, analyse what’s there, and decide whom the cigar is going to be aimed at. The Te-Amo line, for instance, is aimed at beginners, but the Te- Amo Anniversario is a more expensive cigar and aimed at a more sophisticated taste. But so far we haven’t, for example, got a cigar designed specially for women, nor have we so far got anything in the superelite expensive class. All this we take on board and try to maximize the variety of our lines.
Once we have set ourselves a definite goal, we get to work on the mixture and the recipe. My father will give his opinion on the kind of tastes and aromas that the future cigar should have, on the colouring of the wrapper leaf, and on the shape. Then the other specialists – including myself – will put forward their suggestions. After that we make fifty or a hundred cigars from fifteen different blends and try them out so as to select the most suitable. So creating a new cigar is, as you can see, team-work.
The Te-Amo Anniversario, for example, has huge potential – its rating in Cigar Insider is equal to 88 points. Unlike the traditional Te-Amo, which are sold in ordinary unlacquered boxes, the new Te- Amo Anniversario are offered in carefully designed and numbered boxes. These decorative, improved and revamped cigars were created to win over the sophisticated cigar connoisseur not only in the US – which is our priority market – but in other countries as well.
What parts of the world is the Matacapan company aiming for? Oh, we’ve got grandiose plans. Basically, our cigars are sold in thirty countries. But now we’re looking to win over cigar devotees in the Far East, Latin America and Europe. It’s the tastes of the latter, incidentally, that the new Te-Amo – Andrea’s line (named in honour of my sister) – is designed to satisfy. These cigars are already selling well in France, Austria, Spain, Britain, Portugal, Sweden and Norway. For the Latin-American market primarily, we’ve created a new series – Te- Amo Cabinet Selection. This is a strong, aromatic cigar, the filling of which contains a mixture of Mexican, Nicaraguan and Brazilian tobacco.
I’ve also great hopes for the new lines of the revived A. Turrent brand. At present we produce only one series – A. Turrent Tradicional, but in the near future we’re planning to introduce another three: A. Turrent Organic, A. Turrent Reserva Limitada and A. Turrent Reserva de la Casa. The tobacco for these cigars is grown on our own plantations from both Mexican and Cuban seeds without the use of any chemical substances.
There’s a rumour that you’re holding talks with the Davidoff Company? We proposed producing a number of Zino Davidoff lines at our factories in Mexico. They make their cigars in Honduras and the Dominican Republic, so why not try in Mexico? Talks are still in progress, but no final decision has yet been reached.
How many cigars of the long-filler class are you currently producing? About 6.5 million a year. Approximately 60% go to the United States, 13% stay in Mexico, and the rest are sold in other countries. Russia takes about 1%. Our cigars have only just recently become known to smokers in your country, but I think over the next five years shipments will increase substantially. In fact, Russia could well be taking three to four times as many as it does currently, due largely to the premium class cigars which are extremely popular there.
Cigar Clan 2'2005 vol.1. Artashes Shirikyan
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