Manuel Inoa has dedicated more than 30 years to blending premium cigars at La Aurora Cigars. His efforts have garnered praise and respect from his peers, competitors, and cigar smokers the world over but how did this industrial engineer end up at the helm of the Dominican Republic’s most iconic cigar factory?
CS: We see you at events all over the world. Along with Guillermo León, the owner of the company, you are one of the public faces of La Aurora and more importantly you are the company’s master blender. How did you get started in the cigar business?
MI: First, I’m an industrial engineer and before I started working in the cigar business, I didn’t know anything about tobacco or cigars, except cigarettes. My father smoked a lot of cigarettes, and at that time I hated it. But I loved planes, I wanted to be a pilot and I met this guy at the flying club who was in charge of the box factory at General Cigars. And he brought me there to improve the machinery. The efficiency.
CS: What year was this?
MI: This was in the 80s. So, I’m working there, and I had the opportunity to meet many important people in the tobacco industry, like Angel Daniel Nuñez, and my mentor Benjamin [Benji] Menendez. I spent 10 years with the company, first working on the machines and then in the tobacco area and the farms. All of this with the guidance of Benji Menendez and Angel Daniel Nuñez and it was amazing. I was an industrial engineer but as time went on that started to disappear because I was engaged so deeply with them in the tobacco. They were the master blenders for General Cigar, and they taught me, I didn’t even know what a master blender was. I was just working on the blends in the background with their guidance.
Eventually in the early 90s I met someone from La Aurora who introduced me to the León family. I was drawn to the family environment, the family business. It wasn’t money or anything like that that made me go to La Aurora, I just love working with families and this was a Dominican family as opposed to a big company.
CS: Let’s fast forward. You’ve spent 10 years working under these two legends at General Cigars and you take your knowledge and experience to La Aurora. What were your first impressions?
MI: I like the environment and I like the place. And when I met Don Fernando León, may he rest in peace, he was a very nice man. He was an icon in the Dominican cigar business. He asked me, “What are you going to do with my cigars?” It was intimidating but I told him what I saw in the cigars.
I thought that they were very linear, in other words the cigars did not evolve as you smoked. There are basically two types of cigars: linear cigars, and dynamic cigars. I thought that I could modify the blends to make the cigars more dynamic and interesting for the smokers. I told Don Fernando, “I can make the cigars better if you’ll permit me to do it.”
CS: How was this received?
MI: He understood but he didn’t want to risk making changes to all the blends, instead he had me work on his private cigar first. It was his personal line of cigars, only corona sized. It was a big test for me.
His blend was only using two or three types of tobacco, all Dominican. But there were so many different types of tobacco that we could blend with. I explained that if we purchase other types of tobacco, we could have some blends that would be very interesting. So, we started to buy tobacco from Brazil, Ecuador, several places. Guillermo helped me throughout this process, guiding me on what he thought his father would like. I gave him several blends, some with a Cameroon wrapper and others with a corojo wrapper. At one point he comes to me and says, “I like this blend, it has a very nice Dominican Olor in it and a great corojo wrapper. I want this to be my cigar. I don’t want to change anything.”
He fell in love with that cigar. It was a huge challenge for me because I had to make sure that his blend was always consistent. We had to stay on top of the rollers to make sure they didn’t inadvertently change anything. That cigar went on to become a very special cigar. Whenever he had a visitor and it was someone he liked, he would gift them a box of his cigar. That was around 1997 and it proved to Don Fernando and Guillermo that we could improve all of the blends across the board.
CS: Now that we’re talking about all the work you’ve done on those blends, what have been your favorites from them to now?
MI: My favorite of them all has been the La Aurora 100 Años. We released that one in 2003 to celebrate 100 years of the company. There was a lot of pressure to create something special because not only were we celebrating 100 years, but we were also opening a tobacco museum, the best one in the Caribbean. It took us two years to develop it, all eyes were on me, and I felt the pressure.
CS: Well, I can tell you that to this day, that is still the highest rated La Aurora cigar in this magazine. The La Aurora 100 Años No. 4, the corona, received a 93-point rating in the May/June 2009 issue. What are your 2nd and 3rd favorites?
MI: For me the Don Fernando is still one of my all-time favorites but the new La Aurora 120 Años is also up there. It is such a unique cigar; I was trying to blend something that almost didn’t taste like something from La Aurora. I am extremely proud of that blend and the feedback that I’ve been getting from customers tells me that we did something right with that one.
