Wilkey,
Upon further reflection I'm fairly certain that there's something else at play here. I don't deny that some bad blood between Holt's and Padilla probably prompted this copy and the subsequent discontinuing of Holt's carrying Ernesto's line. Exactly what happened, I couldn't say, but Holt's has a decided slant towards anything manufactured by Fuente or Pepin, so it's entirely understandable that they would choose to support Pepin over Padilla. They are very quick to indicate whether or not a particular marca was rolled in either of these two factories, as this somehow indicates automatic higher quality over other brands. Take their current catalog, for example. 32 of the 82 pages are devoted to either Fuente or Pepin rolled cigars. Jorge Padron and Litto Gomez come in a distant 3rd at 4-5 pages each. I haven't been smoking for 30 years, but in the 12 that I have been I've never seen a vendor slam a manufacturer this way in print.
That's a very well-stated observation and I tend to agree. I would hazard that the enmity between Padron and Lew Rothman of JR Cigars would fall into the same class of relationship. However, JRC has never been quite so bald on their commerce site about attacking Padron products directly. The high concentration of Fuente and Pepin products has not gone unnoticed, not even by me. But then again, JR's catalog is heavy with the major Altadis brands (e.g., Romeo y Julieta, H. Upmann) and it does get tedious.
It also seems to me that the advertising copy in the Holt's catalog has started reaching further and further into hyperbole, teeming with all sorts of crazy, excessive descriptors. For example, in their October 2007 catalog (what I have next to me right now) you can find the following: mystifyingly dark, super-extensive natural fermentation, mouthwatering sweetness, scrumptious bouquet, enchantingly rich, profound complexity, like freshly brewed Kona coffee, mind-boggling blend, mouthwatering flavor, lavish notes of earth, oak, and chestnuts, cigar for the ages, bodacious blend, burns in outstanding fashion, rich meaty character, butternut-brown Corojo wrapper, wood, earth, cocoa, and mixed nuts
(I wonder what kinds of nuts are in the mix. Cashews? Filberts? What, what?), wholesome hints
(as opposed to what, perverted hints?) of oak, apricot, and cayenne pepper, assorted peppers
(I can tell bell peppers from chiles, but what other peppers could they be talking about?), fresh cinnamon
(I have never smelled cinnamon bark recently peeled off of a cinnamon or cassia tree but I presume it doesn't taste like the stuff in my Lawry's spice jar), pear, hickory, and tapioca
(good god, they actually wrote tapioca!), hodgepodge of spices, aroma of earth and woodcuttings
(wtf are woodcuttings?), and on and on and on.
What I have not done is an analysis of descriptors used correlated to brands or producers. It's not impossible that this is all part of a subtle attempt to shape the perceptions and expectations of these brands. For example, how many times do you need to read or hear that a cigar is "creamy" before you convince yourself that it is indeed "creamy?"
The Holt's I visited for the first time in the early '70's, is not the Holt's of today. Back in those days it was staffed by gray haired gentlemen in white shirts, black trousers and ties, who actually new something about tobacco, and took pride in their trade. It may have been a gentleman's business back then; I was really too young to know. There's a bunch of sharks in the business today,not much different than the antique business, where wolves in sheep's clothing abound.
Now that I think about it, the practice of telling customers mold is plume, price gouging, contrived rarity etc., only started after the publication of CA and the cigar boom. Those events are responsible for many of the ills in the business today. You can disagree with me, but I was there and the apologists for that publication will never change my mind.
Doc.
When cigars made the flip over from a way of life, to an accoutrement of an aspirational, acquisitive lifestyle, that is when it all went to hell in a hand basket.
Wilkey
