We paid a visit to La Flor Dominicana in the Dominican Republic to spend time with Tony Gomez in order to learn about his history, cigars, and more.

Cigar Press – Growing up, is this something that you wanted to get into or did you have any other plans?

Tony Gomez – I wouldn’t say I was destined to do this my entire life or anything like that.  My dad never pressured me.  He wanted me to do whatever I wanted to do.  If this was what I wanted to do then he was going to be delighted.  I wasn’t pressured or even bred to do this.  It was something that as I got older and was in college, I started to realize that this was a tremendous opportunity.  Ines and my father worked very hard to set up a spectacular company that they were inviting me to be a part of.  I realized I have to try this.  It didn’t take too long before I fell in love with it.

CP – What was your first job in the company?

TG – I started off as a sales rep and was on the road in Florida for four years.  I had to understand that side of the business.  I much prefer to be here at the factory, I like this side much better.  I love the factory, I love being at the factory.

CP – What do you love about it?

TG – The whole tobacco process.  What’s really attractive to me though is the creative side, the artistic side of all of this from the blending to the package designs.  It’s what I love to do.  Down here at the factory is where all of that happens.

CP – How often are you guys playing around with different blends?

TG – We’re always messing around and putting new things together.  That’s one of the fun parts about it.  We did a blend that we really like, but it probably won’t show up at the tradeshow for a couple of years down the line.  Sometimes you come up with something great, but you need to be patient.  But we are always blending tobaccos and playing around.  Having a lot of fun.

CP – Patience is definitely a virtue with tobacco.  So now what’s your role with the company?

TG – Well it’s still a small family business so we all do a lot of everything.  I am still actually the rep in Miami.  So when I’m there I’ll go visit all the shops I used to.  We all wear a lot of hats.  Besides sales I do things here at the factory, I do the social media aspect of the company.  I do a little blending.  I like to get involved with packaging, naming and designing the bands. I also work with a lot of our international customers.  It’s a lot of things and we all do part of it.  I’m happy to contribute wherever I can.

CP – Growing up did you hang out at the factory a lot?

TG – Oh yeah, I would come down all the time.  I’d spend a week here and on the farm for my summer vacation.  My dad would bring me all the time.

CP – Do you remember your first cigar?

TG – Actually it was right here in the office.  I won’t say how old, but I remember my dad handed me a cigar.  This is when the LG was still a prototype.  I didn’t know what it was.  He handed it to me and told me to light it up, which I did.  Then he said, “Tony, if you really want to feel the cigar and experience all those flavors you have to inhale it.”  You want to trust your father.  I mean he is a cigar guy.  It seemed weird, but ok no problem.  I did it.  I spent the next ten minutes kneeling in front of the toilet.  I could hear him in the office laughing the entire time.  I walked back and he looked at me and said, “You know Tony, now you know how not to smoke a cigar.”

CP – Lesson learned! 

TG – I hope to have a son some day and I’ll do the same thing.  It’s a Gomez tradition.

CP – So tell us about what we are smoking, this is one of your blends?

TG – This was actually my third blend.  La Nox is something that we’ve been working on for about a year.  It has a Brazilian maduro wrapper, the darkest ones we have.  It has a Mexican San Andrés binder and fillers from our farm here in the Dominican Republic including two of my favorites, Pelo de Oro and the Piloto.  It was a very simple blend and it’s not as powerful as other cigars that we’ve made. It’s also a thinner ring gauge.  It’s a cigar that we really enjoy.  The flavor is spectacular.  The blend itself is what really inspired the theme, the ring, the box, everything.  The flavor of the cigar was so dark and rich.  When we were thinking of a name it was one of those things that was natural.  It’s the night, which is what La Nox means in Latin.

CP – A lot of people will see a dark cigar and just assume it’s got a powerful body.  This is nice because it’s just so flavorful yet doesn’t have that “knock you off your seat” power.  So it’s nice to see cigars that are rich and dark, but not the power people mistakenly assume comes with a dark color. 

TG – It’s packed with flavor and it does have body, but it’s more in the background.

CP – Let’s get back to family.  We  know from experience that it can sometimes be tricky.  How is it for your family working together?

TG – It can definitely be tricky.  I have an awesome relationship with my dad.  I consider him my best friend.  I’ve known Ines my entire life.  They both expect a lot out of me.  They have a high standard for me.  I’m okay with that and up for the challenge.  I make sure that I contribute in every way that I possibly can.  Whatever I can do I don’t complain.  I’m here to work, and I’m happy to work with them.

CP – Do you spend a lot of time on the farm or get involved with that aspect?

TG – Yeah when it’s growing season we’ll be out there a lot.  I definitely know more about the factory aspect and the business side than I do about the agronomy.  That’s something that takes a lot longer to learn since you only get so much time per year to do it.  It’s something I still need to learn a lot about but it’s really cool.  That farm was probably the best decision that Ines and my dad ever made.  It really gave us control.  Full control of what we do here.  When we started making cigars it was right in the middle of the cigar boom.

CP – How difficult was that?

TG – We were nobody at the time.  It was difficult to get high quality tobacco in the open market.  That tobacco was already claimed by the established guys.  It was hard to get a foot in the door with a lot of growers and tobacco distributors.  The only way to start making more full bodied cigars, the cigars we really wanted to smoke, was to start growing tobacco.  Again I really have to hand it to my dad and Ines, who really had no growing experience whatsoever.  They had never grown anything in their lives and now we have hundreds of acres of farm land.  It was a lot of trial an error, just like the factory was.  My dad tells a story about the first batch of a hundred, or a hundred-fifty thousand cigars that were made.  He threw them in a dumpster and set them on fire.  They were no good.  That was the moment La Flor Dominicana was defined as a brand.   That was the moment where we decided what kind of brand we would be.  Are we going to make the best cigars that we can?  Are we just going to take advantage of this cigar boom that was going on?  What are we going to do?  Obviously we chose the path to make the best cigars that we could.  That really paid off when you look at how many factories were in the Dominican Republic during the 90s, and how many remain today.  Not only are we still here but we’ve thrived.  We made some important decisions that set us up for the future.  Those decisions are what defined the brand for today.

CP – Looking at La Flor Dominicana cigars today, it’s hard to imagine that they used to all be mild.  Was that because it was your family’s taste at the time, or a circumstance of the boom?

TG – When we first started making cigars it was with the Premium Line, now known as Suavé.  Same cigar we’ve made for twenty years.  That’s the traditional Dominican cigar.  It has a Connecticut shade wrapper, Dominican binder and filler; very mild, very smooth.  It was the way Dominican cigars were made.  That’s what my dad smoked.  He smoked cigars before getting into the business.  But that’s what he smoked, mild cigars.  It’s what he knew and what he was used to, so it’s what he started making.  But as his palate evolved, he wanted more flavor and more body.   That’s when the LFD profile started to develop.  The 2000 Series came out, which was very different from the Premium Line, Eventually the Ligero, then Double Ligero, which is probably our most famous, or notorious blend.  Those are the cigars that gave us our reputation and image for being a full-bodied company.  It was just a situation where my dad’s palate evolved and the blends he started to make followed that.

CP – Better products definitely seem to come from places where people make what they like to smoke.  Honestly there is no other way other. 

TG – Absolutely.

CP – So how did the idea to start La Flor Dominicana come to be?

TG – It was a crazy idea.  My dad was a jeweler in Miami back in the early 90s. He had a pawn shop as well.  It was par for the course, being in that business you get robbed every once and while. It had happened a few times, but the one that broke the camels back is when two guys came in with ski masks and machine guns, they tied him to a chair in the back and cleaned out the whole place.  Luckily he was insured and was able to recoup.  But that money was the initial money that was put into what became La Flor Dominicana.  We started in 1994.  Ines and my father had a partner, who parted ways in 1996, so that is when we formed La Flor Dominicana.  It was Ines and my father as equal partners.

CP – La FLor Dominicana is a beautiful name for a cigar.

TG – The name was actually a last minute thing.  My dad tells the story when he was on the phone with the lawyer and he had to register the company and go through setting up all of the business.  He still didn’t know what to call it.  When he was on the phone it hit him and he decided on it.  But La Flor Dominicana really means a couple of things.  First, the flower that we used on all of our packaging, and now the 1994 is the tobacco flower.  That’s the flower that blooms on top of the plant when it’s ready to go.  Here when something is La Flor of something that means it’s the best of that thing.  So it had a double meaning.

CP – The Chisel is still an awesome shape to experience. It feels so natural.  Can you tell us how that shape came to be?

TG – It was a random idea.  My dad was on the way to the factory one day, he was smoking a torpedo.  He chewed it and it became flat.  When he looked at it I guess a light bulb went off in his head.  He came to the office, took a round headed cigar and whittled it down to the chisel shape.  Then he took it to the rolling room, put a wrapper on it and smoked it.  He loved the way it felt.  The cool thing about the Chisel is that you can take a larger ring gauge, but it won’t feel like one.    That was it.  It took a little time to perfect making it.  We spent about six months getting the mold right, and sorting through the details before it hit the roller’s tables.  It eventually became the only patented cigar shape in the world.  Like a torpedo it’s a hard shape to perfect.  It needs just the right amount of tobacco at the head to make it work properly.  It doesn’t take the most highly skilled roller, but good skills for sure.

CP – What is the cigar that you like to start your day with?

TG – The Cameroon #3.  That’s a habit I picked up from my father.  If he doesn’t have his Cameroon #3 and coffee in the morning I won’t talk to him.  That’s the cigar I smoke the most of.  I love the size, the flavor; it’s really just the perfect size.  I really don’t smoke a lot of big cigars.  I prefer coronas, petite coronas, maybe Churchill and things like that.  Currently I’m infatuated with La Nox.  I don’t have the luxury to be able to pick and choose what I smoke believe it or not.  Smoking is part of our job, whether tobacco from the pilones, or samples, there is always some sort of quality control and that requires smoking.  If I’m smoking a finished cigar with a label on it my dad yells at me.  He tells me to go smoke something from a table.  But all in all I’m really just a blessed guy.  I’m lucky to be in the position that I’m in. I love the industry and love going to stores and meeting people.  I’m having the time of my life being part of it all.

Be sure to check out https://www.laflordominicana.com/ for more information