Wake up, shower and off to La Estrella. There are worse ways to start your morning. As Janny García explained as we walked around her family’s farm in Estelí—it’s a pretty nice morning walk. Estelí is a half mile above sea level and much dryer than Managua, meaning it was still in the high 70s as our tour began. The tour was led by family patriarch José “Pepín” García. He’s one of a few men in Nicaragua who own cigar companies, but are clearly farmers at heart. You can just see his face light up when he talks about the farm and its tobacco, it’s a different sort of brightness than when he talks about the company’s cigars. (Abdel Fernandez of A.J. Fernandez is the other person that immediately comes to mind.) Pepín reiterated what I’d heard from others: rains late last year forced a slightly delay in the country’s planting season. As such, the plants in La Estrella weren’t as large as they were when I visited the farm this time last year. Pete Johnson of Tatuaje also joined us on the tour and was smoking the new La Vérité 2013, which is made entirely of tobacco from the 2013 ...
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