General Cigar Dominicana Trip – Day One Photos and Summary

After a day of travel Sunday, we all gathered around the hotel pool for cigars and snacks.  It was great getting to know a bunch of fellow bloggers/cigar maniacs as well as hanging out with Rick Rodreguez, Michael Giannini, Benji Menendez, Yuri Guillen and Victoria McKee .  I called it a night shortly after midnight, although many continued on.

After a restful night’s sleep, we gathered and started our tour of the General Cigar operations.  We  were given a presentation and introduced to the management team, then we set off for a blending session.  This was much more intensive and diverse than I’ve done before, and I’m sure I blended something spectacularly bad,  no fault of the materials.  We smoked a bunch of “fumas” made from single leaves, and then went through some blends of our choosing rolled into a fuma.  I was pretty overwhelmed, but we shall see how it turns out with a binder and wrapper.  We had a tour of the warehouses,  sorting, stripping, fermenting, sorting again, etc.  It’s incomprehensible the magnitude of the operation, and we haven’t even seen the half of it yet.  Enjoy the photos and feel free to leave any questions in the comments, I will  go back and add some captions as time allows.  We have a pretty tight schedule of activities and  my time is limited.  I only count about 5 cigars smoked so far, but that doesn’t count the dozen or so fumas at the blending session.  By the way, blending a cigar ain’t easy!

Many thanks to everyone for making this an unforgettable day!

Until the next time,

CigarCraig