A Visit to Tabacalera A. Fuente: Aging Rooms

We will never rush the hands of time.

Trademark, Arturo Fuente.

It’s most evident in a long, narrow and remarkably quiet hallway. Far away from most of the action at Tabacalera A. Fuente y Cia Planta No. 1 are the places where most of the cigars rest. In the last year or two, the company has taken a different approach to its aging rooms. When the newest rolling areas were built, new aging rooms were built nearby. The theory is the same as it is in pre-industry: reduce the travel and you reduce the potential for damage. But most of the tens of millions of cigars that the company rolls every year are brought to this hallway, where they are placed inside one of these rooms.

While Arturo Fuente has a longstanding partnership with Boveda, Inc.—the Minnesota company that creates humidification packs—this room has little to do with that Boveda. In Spanish, boveda means vault. This is a cigar vault, complete with a lock.

After the cigars have been rolled and inspected, they are brought to these rooms. During this visit, Fuente had roughly a dozen operational cigar rolling rooms—spread across two floors—and about the same number of aging rooms. A factory of this size needs a team dedicated to carefully moving the cigars, organizing them and managing the physical space so that there’s always room for tomorrow’s production.

Everywhere in the factory, but especially in these quieter corridors, there are references to spirituality. This isn’t simply putting a “cigar store Indian” in the hallway. Some rooms have tobacco dangling from the ceiling or other objects dedicated to the native peoples for Carlos “Carlito” Fuente Jr. to use when he wants to engage in the spiritual aspects of tobacco.

In case it isn’t clear, the late Carlos Fuente Sr. is always watching.

Each room is pretty similar but a little bit different. At any one time, millions of Arturo Fuente, Ashton, J.C. Newman and Prometheus cigars are aging for various amounts of time. The Fuente family’s Cuban-American roots are evident on the Spanish tiles used for the floors of all but one of these rooms.

For a company that is OCD about most things, what you see above is noticeably inconsistent.

Some of the cigars are transported in bundles, some are packed in wooden crates that store around 500 cigars, while Hemingway and other perfecto shapes get their own unique wooden crates. It would seem the future is crates, which make it easier to keep track of inventory and tend to reduce damage. But, the method of placing cigars in wheels of 50—they are called media ruedas, half wheels—is tradition and saying goodbye to tradition is tough. So at this particular moment in time—April 2022—some rooms were filled with crates, others had the half wheels, but most rooms used both.

Quarter wheels!

Given the success of the Hemingway line, it’s quite possible that no factory rolls more perfecto-shaped cigars than Planta No. 1. Those cigars get these specially made curved trays that help to maximize the space of the cigars, which are tapered. Less obvious is the fact the trays have shelves—which are angled—something that isn’t typically seen on a cigar tray. Again, it’s all about maximizing space and reducing damage.

Nearby the aging rooms are some rather elaborate models of the Fuente family’s history, including the same model of car that Carlos Fuente Sr. had when he first moved to the Dominican Republic as well a replica of the house in Ybor City that once served as the company’s factory.

While the door that leads to the OpusX aging room looks more or less the same as the others, the inside is very different. Yes, there’s an LED sign, an encased OpusX logo on the floor, Spanish tiles and better lighting, but the most notable difference is that the cigars are placed in cabinets, with doors, instead of open shelving.

Not only do the doors make it look better than a typical aging room, but they should also produce more precise humidity control. Arturo Fuente says that a standard Fuente Fuente OpusX cigar is aged for one year, though the company is oftentimes releasing cigars with multiple years—sometimes even a decade—of aging.

Down some steps, in the corner of the aging room lies what is likely the most photographed part of any cigar aging room in the world: El Altar de la Inspiración. (I seem to recall this once being named The Toymaker’s Vault.)

Arturo Fuente has made all sorts of interesting shapes and sizes of cigars over the years. For years, the best place to see these was the now defunct vitolas.net, a website that chronicled hundreds of Fuente releases, especially the one-off OpusX cigars like the multi-colored culebras and a cigar that had a cap designed to look like the Pope’s hat. Many of these cigars are only made once and will never leave this room, though some of them have been released in small quantities via charitable auctions.

Few people have smoked any of these cigars, but Brooks has. Yes, the FFOX Football, made for Dan Marino’s charity, is smokeable. No, it’s not an OpusX blend.

If you need LBMFs or BBMFs, this would be the room.

The difference between a good cigar and a bad cigar is typically determined by two factors: time and tobacco. There are ways to circumvent or shortcut most parts of the cigarmaking process and some are talented or lucky enough to close the gap. But ultimately, when everything else is maximized—blending talent, quality control, packaging, marketing, pricing, etc.—there’s little a factory can do to make up for not having enough tobacco and/or not having enough time.

The factories producing the most lauded cigars in the world tend to operate with a pretty similar easy-to-understand formula: in a given year, get more tobacco than what is needed for your annual production, roll more cigars than you plan on selling.

It’s taken the Fuente family more than a century to get to this point, one where they can afford—both in money and time—to operate with this formula that always leaves a few more pilónes than what a factory needs and a few more boxes than what the sales team will sell. Now that they’ve achieved it, it doesn’t look that difficult.

Words by Charlie Minato. Photographs by Brooks Whittington.