What a day!
Here’s a quick blow-by-blow. Videos will start to follow when I get a chance to edit them over the next couple of weeks.
After a terrific breakfast that included “gallo pinto” (“speckled rooster”), the unofficial national dish of Nicaragua, which is basically rice and pinto beans, fried separately then mixed together, we jumped on the bus and headed to the Perdomo factory.
We got a quick tour of the rolling rooms and the rooms where the finished cigars are aged up to 15 years. It was in the ageing room that we got our first experience of breathing ammonia. OMG. I nearly died within seconds. That’s the stuff you DON’T want in your cigars, and a premium cigar will have been aged long enough to remove most of it. Billy Perdomo, brother of Nick Perdomo Jr who is the President and Founder of the company and the guy who is being kind enough to be our tour guide, pulled out some very special cigars for us to try – the Estate Selection 2005 Royal. Very smooth.
Then Billy walked us out to the seedling sheds around the back where we saw the machine that allows them to plant one single seed at a time in seedling trays. Tobacco seeds are the size of ground pepper or ground coffee. Nick told us the other day that you can fit 10,000 of them into a bottel cap. So imagine trying to get ONE into a seedling container. Well they have an amazing machine that does that and we were shown how it works by one of the workers. Then we saw seedlings of various ages in these long tents (each one about about a football field long).
Then we jumped back on the bus for the 5 minute drive to the Esteli farms. Perdomo have several farms around Nicaragua and these are the closest to the factory.
This is where the seedlings go when they are about 20 days old.
We saw lots of various ages, young plants, mature plants, plants that have already been harvested a few times, and plants that have finished being harvested and are waiting to be plowed back into the ground. The ground is plowed, by the way, by oxen.
After the farms, we had lunch and then back to the factory for a tour lead by Aristides Garcia, Perdomo’s master cigar maker. Aristides has been in the cigar game for over 65 years, most of which he spent as the #1 guy for Cuba Tobacco. He’s 77 years young, works like a maniac, and told us that he’s been smoking 20 cigars a day – since he was 14. He’s never had a day off work and can’t remember the last time he was sick. Aristides showed us the entire production flow from immediately after the leaves are harvested, through the various stages of drying, sorting and ageing. He went into heaps of detail about each step of the process, showing us the care that Perdomo takes to make sure their cigars are the best in the world. I grabbed all of this on video and it’s fantastic stuff. Once you’ve heard Aristides tell his story (well, he told it in Spanish, but Billy translated), you’ll better understand why Perdomo cigars are so superior to most of the cigars on the market.
Finally, we headed back to Hotel La Campina for dinner, rum and cigars.
Tomorrow’s agenda – the rolling factory, the box factory, and then dominos with Uncle Tony. 
Vincent, Aristides, Billy, Jason