Gordon Mott Most Recent Comments: See Also: Starry, Starry NightPosted: 10:44 AM ET, September 09, 2010 The Big Dipper tilted across the western sky. A dazzling combo of Jupiter and Uranus had risen high in the east. And, about 10 men, nine Danes and an American (yours truly), were lighting up cigars after a night of revelry celebrating one of the Danes’ 25th wedding anniversary. The outdoor air at 1 a.m. was crisp, but apparently warm by early September standards in Denmark because some of the men were in shirtsleeves; the American was shivering, still in his sport coat and long sleeve shirt.
The evening had been deeply stepped in tradition, with formal speeches by the spouses, their son, and a series of songs, poems and heartfelt toasts—some a little ribald—by friends from both sides of the couple; by heritage, the husband’s friends were all Danish, and the wife’s friends, all American. About 35 people sat at the table, mostly grouped by language facility, but with a lot of cross-cultural exchange happening all night long. Also by tradition, when the husband left the room to use the bathroom, all the men jumped up and circled around to the head table to kiss the wife; and vice-versa; when she left the room shortly thereafter, all the women headed for a quick smooch with the husband.
Of course, at the end of each toast, there was a loud Skål (pronounced skoal) shouted around the room, and an instruction to repeat a uniquely Danish chant, best described as a Nordic version of hooray, but pronounced more like “oooo, wahhhhh," and sounded out with either a short or long phrase on each syllable: so three shorts and a long was … well you get the idea. Read more
Cigar Inventory
Posted: 08:44 AM ET, August 23, 2010 I’m getting ready to re-stock my personal cigar inventory. I’ve been fortunate in that most of the cigars I smoke are at work, and supplied as part of our tasting reports. But you’ve all seen my humidor at home. It’s got a mix of cigars from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Cuba. There’s also a drawer full of “assorted” cigars, most of which are not my favorite smokes, but my friends appreciate getting them on the golf course, or as part of one of our after-dinner rituals at my house.
But thanks in part to a steady, if not rapid, consumption of my personal stock, and a tragic beetle infestation that took about 100 cigars to an early grave, I’m in the acquisition mode, especially for Cubans. Frankly, I haven’t purchased Cubans in a number of years because of my concerns about the construction quality, and even the tobacco quality, of their cigars. That period of questionable quality seems to be in the past.
So, I can tell you that I will be looking for larger cigars, and maybe a box or two of lanceros, one of my favorite sizes. In the double corona category, we’ve had some great Lusitanias recently, and since that’s always one of my favorites, so I’ll be searching for them. And, I’m always partial to Romeo y Julieta Churchills; they’ll be on my shopping list too. Believe it or not, one of my current favorite lanceros is the Vegueros, which are not always available, but they are a great value and usually pretty full-flavored. Read more
Chloe R.I.P.Posted: 09:55 AM ET, July 09, 2010 Our faithful companion, Chloe, a.k.a. Clos Vougeot, left this world about three weeks ago. I haven’t been able to sit down to write this farewell until this week. The emotions were just too raw and too painful, but with a little passage of time, the pain is a little less acute. I’m slowly coming around to a place where I can remember her presence with a deep fondness without tears coming to my eyes. And, I can appreciate that the loneliness my wife and I feel without her around is testimony to how much we loved her and how much a part of our lives she was every day.
Longtime readers of Cigar Aficionado will remember her, a beautiful, jet-black Belgian Sheepdog. She and I were photographed along with Marvin Shanken’s Wheaten Terrier Christina for the editor’s page in an issue that launched a re-design of Cigar Aficionado magazine in June 2000. She was just two and a half years old at the time and if it looked like I had a virtual hammerlock on her in the photos, I did; it was hard to keep her in one place for any length of time. That remained true for nearly her entire life.
Then, two months ago, she woke up one morning and was unable to get to her feet. I helped her up, and within a couple of days that had turned into me carrying her downstairs every morning and back up every night. The world of advanced veterinary science did everything it knew how to do, at each turn of the diagnostic wheel, eliminating possible causes and coming up with potential treatments. Read more
Spring in New York City
Posted: 09:29 AM ET, April 27, 2010 Spring never seems to come soon enough in the Northeast, especially after the recent long, cold, wet winter of 2009-2010. But last Friday, the day offered up not just spring-like weather, but the promise of an early summer. It was all blue sky and bright sunshine, and I was lucky enough to enjoy it all on the terrace of the Metropolitan Club, a venerable institution at 60th and Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park.
I had lunch there with Max Gutmann, the owner of the Casa del Habano franchise in Mexico, and a true standard bearer for the words, cigar lover. In the style of traditional New York clubs, gentlemen at the Metropolitan are required to wear a coat and tie. The room was busy, and the food was good, but as we sat drinking a wonderful 2001 Bordeaux, and reminiscing about old times in the cigar business, and about Mexico, the terrace beckoned through the greenhouse-like floor to ceiling windows.
There are more than a few places like this in Manhattan—terraces and outdoor spaces where, when the weather warms up, you can enjoy a great cigar. We’ve reviewed a few of the public spaces, usually in restaurants, where you can be sure that lighting up is allowed. But the city’s private clubs also accommodate their members whenever it is possible. Apart from the Metropolitan Club, others that I know about include the Yale Club and the Knickerbocker Club. And, I know of other clubs that have been reviewing architectural plans to see if they can pull off an outdoor space, with their smoking members in mind. Read more
Casa de Campo: The Hotel
Posted: 03:20 PM ET, March 12, 2010 What do you get when you carve out 7,000 acres of Caribbean coastline, build a hotel with 265 rooms and 100 private villa rental homes, construct four golf courses, a new marina, private beach and a residential community the size of a small city? Paradise? Pretty darn close.
Casa de Campo started out life as a retreat for the Gulf & Western Corp. executives around 1970. Since then, it has become one of the most sought-after destinations in the Caribbean, especially for the golf, first at Teeth of the Dog and more recently, Dye Fore, two of the best golf courses you can find anywhere. The hotel recently underwent an extensive $20 million renovation, completely redoing the main lobby building, the pool area, the main hotel restaurant and the award-winning Cygalle Healing Spa. After nearly 40 years, the updates were welcome and have added a pleasant new sheen to an old dame.
Given the size of the property, and the fact that many of the amenities are spread out, it may not be the perfect destination for you. The marina, where there are many restaurants and shops is, for instance, at the opposite end of the property, a good 15 minute ride in the little red golf carts that come as part of your room. The beach is a 10 minute cart ride from the main hotel building too. That may not be what you want.
But if what you’re looking for is more of a resort community feel, with all the amenities there, then this may be the perfect experience for you. Read more
The Pebble Beach of the CaribbeanPosted: 09:17 AM ET, March 10, 2010 The rating of golf courses is subjective. Some players like old-style parkland courses, some like the links format, others only get excited over target golf. The debate over modern versus traditional designs can go on forever. There are very few perfect golf courses, although we all know the ones that get touted as such by name: Pine Valley, Augusta, Shinnecock, Cypress Point, Pebble Beach, Winged Foot, Seminole and places like Pinehurst No. 2 are just a few of the great ones.
I’ve been lucky enough to play a lot of great courses in the United States. My playing partners in Casa de Campo last week have been even luckier, playing not only great courses in America but around the world. About the only major resort they haven’t played is Bandon Dunes. And, in their mind the combination of Dye Fore and Teeth of the Dog (rated the 34th best course in the world by Golf Magazine) represents two of the best adjacent courses that they have played.
Dye Fore was completed in 2003, and the setting alone is spectacular, flowing down and then back to the Tuscan style hilltop village called Altos de Chavón; The front nine has numerous vistas of the Caribbean Sea to the south of Casa de Campo, and on the back nine, you can peer down 300 feet into the gorge where the Rio Chavón runs. Read more
Golf Trip
Posted: 09:50 AM ET, March 08, 2010 You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief around the stone coffee table on the outdoor patio, the palm fronds brushing against each other in the light breeze and the stars—especially the Orion constellation—shining in the clear, nighttime sky. We were sitting there in shirt sleeves, a glass of Brugal rum on the rocks with a slice of lime, and the magazine’s Cigar of the Year, a Padrón Family Reserve No. 45 Maduro in our hands. It was our second night at Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic, but the first night, after a three a.m. wake-up call for a six a.m. flight, the cigar and glass of rum hadn’t been quite as relaxed, more a defiant declaration that we were on vacation than a laid back moment before collapsing into bed—and the golf hadn’t even started yet.
We were at the Caribbean golf resort for a three-day binge of golf—36 holes a day which, trust me, is more golf than four guys in their late 50s should even dream about playing. Golf trips can be a bit problematic, the search for the right mix of personalities and desires potentially subject to miscalculations of intentions and incompatibilities. But the four guys—Chuck, Mory, Matt and yours truly—around the patio epitomized the synergy of the perfect combination. Three of us went to the same college, so even though we weren’t close friends 35 years ago, the shared history has smoothed the way to an adult friendship that can be rare to find as you get older. Read more
Cigar Culture
Posted: 11:04 AM ET, February 22, 2010 I sometimes forget about the origin of cigars. I know that might sound odd. But I’m not saying that I don’t know where a cigar is made—that has become second nature. What I’m talking about is sometimes taking for granted the long arc of history and the incredible nuances of culture linked to premium hand-rolled cigars.
Maybe my awareness is dulled by living in a time where tobacco is demonized, and by appreciating it, being branded as a SMOKER, the modern day equivalent of a scarlet letter. That harsh environment forces me the build up defenses, those rationalizations and justifications that I use for both personal and public consumption. But in the end, one of the things that happens to us all is that when we seek acceptable explanations—personal freedoms, pleasure, camaraderie—it is easy to overlook some of the other reasons, maybe truly primal reasons, that tobacco has been a part of history in Americas for several millennium. We skip over the fact that in the original colonial culture, one of the first things passed along from the indigenous tribes to the first Europeans who landed on the shores of the New World was tobacco.
There’s no mystery why I’m feeling this way. Spending four days in the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola, the history is simply inescapable. Read more
Day Three: A Tribute to Cigars
Posted: 04:21 PM ET, February 19, 2010 They stood at the back of the makeshift room set up inside the cigar factory with a podium at the front and rows of tables arranged for a cigar seminar conducted by the owner of Matasa, and the creator of the Casa Magna, Fonseca and the new Quesada brands. Dressed in white t-shirts that commemorated today’s launch of the Quesada Tributo cigar, which will hit retail stores by May, the employees of the Matasa factory in Santiago, Dominican Republic, listened attentively to the presentation in English by their employer, their patriarch, Manuel Quesada. Certainly, only a few understood the words. When Manuel’s daughter Raquel introduced them as part of the Matasa family, the “artists who create our ideas,” the entire room of about 50 ProCigar festival attendees stood and applauded them. Read more
Day Two: ProCigar Festival
Posted: 02:54 PM ET, February 18, 2010 I won’t give you the details about last night’s ProCigar Festival dinner. Suffice it to say I did not escape the merengue dance contest, which was officiated by José Blanco of La Aurora. He called on me to come up to the stage and show the world how little I knew about the local dance step; all I can say is, “Wait 'til next year’s Big Smoke, José.” I don’t think anyone from Dancing With The Stars will be calling me. But it was a lot of fun, even if you are like me and your idea of fun is not exactly the same thing as dancing an unfamiliar Caribbean dance style in front of 200 people. At least my Dominican partner was forgiving.
My day began over breakfast with Litto Gomez of La Flor Dominicana. Just like Henke Kelner of Davidoff, Gomez thinks he has one of the best crops that’s he ever produced at his farm La Canela (see - Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 - |
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