THE CIGAR INDUSTRY IS REJOICING AS ONE OF AMERICA'S FAVORITE CIGAR TOWNS BRINGS HOME THE SUPER BOWL TROPHY
Monday, February 8, 2021
CIGARS ARE FOR CELEBRATING LIFE !!!!: CONGRATULATIONS TO THE 2021 SUPER BOWL CHAMPION TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Saturday, January 30, 2021
THE LIFE LONG LOVE AFFAIR : WINSTON CHURCHILL AND HIS HABITS
The Good Life
Smoking And Drinking Like Churchill
Winston Churchill had a legendary love of cigars and drinks. We asked two experts to examine his taste for the good life, and separate fact from fiction
By David Savona | From Churchill, May/June 2018
Courtesy of James J. Fox, London
The chair in which Churchill sat at London's James J. Fox.
Imagining the great Sir Winston Churchill without a cigar clamped in his jaws or between his fingers is almost impossible. Stories that relate his prodigious drinking abound.
His appetites for both, in quantities that would render even the hardiest among us incapacitated, seem superhuman.
What is real and what is legend?
Was he truly—as he is so often portrayed—never without a smoke, drinking morning, noon and night?
To uncover the truth, we reached out to the experts: Lee Pollock, trustee and advisor to the Board of The International Churchill Society, and Rob Fox, a co-owner of James J. Fox in London and Ireland.
Legend: Churchill smoked a staggering amount of cigars.
Reality: By any reasonable standard.
“The number of cigars he smoked is truly extraordinary,” says Fox, whose company sold its first cigars in 1787. Churchill was a client of the store (then called Robert Lewis) at London’s 19 St. James Street. Fox has handwritten ledgers, telegrams and other records that document that the soldier/statesman bought hundreds of thousands of cigars there. During one six-month stretch in 1964—the year before he died—Churchill bought 825 cigars: 250 in April, 275 cigars in June and 100 per month in July, August and September. “It was a pretty consistent pattern of what he was buying,” says Fox. And that wasn’t the only shop supplying him with cigars. “He was doing business with a lot of cigar stores,” says Fox, “but we were one of his largest suppliers.”
Legend: He would smoke just about anywhere.
Reality: According to photographic evidence.
While visiting New York City in 1931, Churchill momentarily forgot that Americans drive on the right (or wrong, in his view) side of the road and was struck by a car. Upon his return home to England, Churchill was strapped to a gurney and put into an ambulance. A photo of the moment shows him smiling happily, puffing on his cigar. It wasn’t the only time Churchill was photographed on a stretcher smoking a cigar.
Photo/Jeff Harris
Vintage Romeo y Julieta Churchills, one of the most famous Cuban cigars. To find out when Churchills became Churchills, click here.
Legend: He only smoked Churchills.
Reality: Close, but no cigar.
Cuba’s Churchill size—seven inches long by 47 ring gauge—was named for the great statesman, but he smoked cigars of varying size. “He bought all sorts of different brands and sizes,” says Fox, whose ledgers show repeated purchases of Romeo y Julieta Pirámides and Romeo Epicure Grandes, which are no longer part of the main Cuban Romeo line, as well as other smokes.
Legend: He never shopped for bargains.
Reality: Depended on the occasion.
A telegram to the Robert Lewis shop, dated October 8, 1963, details Churchill’s order for a gift of cigars for his grandson. “A box of 25 cigars of good quality, but not quite as good as the Romeo & Juliet,” it reads.
On a trip to the United States in the 1930s, according to Pollock, he bought Royal Darby Longfellows, paying $147 for 1,000 (less than 15 cents apiece). “He had to economize here and there,” says Pollock.
“His bills for cigars, wine and food were considerable.”
Legend: He had vast stocks of smokes.
Reality: How big is your humidor?
“At Chartwell, his home in Kent, he had a cigar storage area with 3,000 or 4,000 cigars,” says Pollock.
Legend: His day began with a glass of Scotch.
Reality: It did indeed.
Just as portrayed in the film Darkest Hour, Churchill greeted the morning with a cigar and a Scotch and soda while in bed. Pollock explains that he would wake around 8 a.m. and begin reading through a stack of newspapers, not leaving bed until about 10. He would sip his Scotch, adding water to it throughout the day.
Legend: He was often inebriated.
Reality: He held his liquor.
“He drank a lot, but he didn’t drink near as much as popular legend would have it,” says Pollock. “The amount he drank was exaggerated.” It is true that Churchill drank Champagne with lunch, French reds and whites with other meals, Cognac later in the day and more Scotch at night. He also liked Martinis. (And he liked them exceptionally dry, unlike his ally, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who made them “very long on vermouth,” says Pollock.)
But all this drinking didn’t mean Churchill was stumbling around. “There’s almost no record of him being drunk in public,” says Pollock, giving credence to Churchill’s famous line: “I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.”
Courtesy of James J. Fox, London
James J. Fox still has the ledgers of Churchill's considerable cigar purchases.
Legend: He was brand loyal.
Reality: True, for his drinks….
Churchill’s Scotch of choice was Johnnie Walker Red or Black (blends were far more prevalent than single malts in his day) and he adored Pol Roger Champagne. “He became quite friendly with the Pol Roger family,” says Pollock. Pol Roger created a special Champagne in his honor, Pol Roger Cuvée Winston Churchill.
…But not his cigars. “His favorite brand was Romeo y Julieta, but it wasn’t the only brand he smoked,” says Fox. Most cigar smokers in Churchill’s day stuck to one size from one brand. Not Sir Winston, who puffed a variety, much like the cigar smoker of today, only on a far grander scale. “He was buying all sorts of different brands and sizes,” says Fox.
“He bought multiple boxes of multiple lines per order. One order could be three or four brands, and multiple boxes within those lines.”
Legend: He left few cigars behind.
Reality: He smoked most of them.
“There was never a big, huge auction of cigars at the end of Churchill’s life. It wasn’t as if he was buying to collect,” says Fox.
“He was buying to consume.”
A box of cigars once owned by Sir Winston—along with the Romeo y Julietas it contained—is on display at Fox’s shop in London, under glass, along with a cigar case once carried by the Prime Minister.
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Friday, October 16, 2020
SMOKING GREAT CIGARS WITH GOOD FRIENDS
AN AMAZING SMOKE! (AN H. UPMANN # 2) Thank you Compadre Alejandro Torres Bueno.
CIGARS WITH FRIENDS AND A COLD ONE!
ANOTHER GREAT SMOKE! (A COHIBA SIGLO VI) Thanks, amigo Jaime Marti Iturbide
DURING COVID WE KEEP OUR DISTANCE! (A DIESEL by AJ FERNANDEZ) Thank you Dennis Bartelmo!
PRE COVID: CORONADO TABACCO with good friends! February 2002.
San Diego Harbour 2020
VALLEY CENTER HILLTOP RETREAT
THANK YOU, AJ FERNANDEZ!
WITH GOOD FRIENDS SAN DIEGO HARBOUR 2020
Friday, March 9, 2018
TWO HUNDRED PAIRS OF HANDS
Two Hundred Pairs of Hands
It’s often said that 200 pairs of hands touch your cigar before it makes it to your humidor. Some claim the number is even higher.
Suffice to say, every time you light up a cigar, many, many people with many different skills all contributed to bringing you the ultimate handmade product.
It starts with seed selection and greenhouse cultivation. Cigar tobacco starts as a tiny seed, most often planted in a tray and grown in a greenhouse. Once the seedlings are a few inches high, they’re transplanted to the fields where they can flourish. At full height and maturity, the leaves are removed by hand, harvested, and hung in a curing barn to dry and turn brown. That’s a few dozen hands before the tobacco has even left the farm.
The cured tobacco is then taken to a facility, unpacked, and piled up for fermentation. When fermentation is complete, the tobacco pile is separated and laid on drying racks to air out. Then, it’s all repacked and stowed for aging.
After a few years, the aged tobacco is unpacked again, rehydrated in a special misting room, and categorized for color. That’s a few more dozen hands.
The outer wrapper leaves will also undergo destemming or despalillo, a process where the thick, central vein is removed from the leaf. Sometimes that step is done completely by hand, other times the tobacco is fed through a stripping machine. For filler, a worker will remove part of the stem by hand, leaving the rest intact. More hands.
Don’t forget the rolling process, which requires appointed factory workers to dole out the proper proportions of aged tobacco to the rollers each day.
The torcedor takes his pile of leaves back to his rolling table and recreates the cigar according to the cigarmaker’s blend, bunching and rolling each cigar by hand. The blend is formulated of exacting proportions of very specific tobaccos to impart a very particular smoking experience—a formulation that puts more hands on your cigars.
Finished cigars are sorted for color consistency, then sent to the aging room.
Finally, they’re banded up, boxed, and sent out. This is the basic chronology of how a cigar is made.
There are, of course, plenty of other quality-control steps that vary from operation to operation, and nearly all are completed entirely by hand, but the point is this: a single hand-rolled cigar is a massive human effort that requires hands-on expertise on every level.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)