PCA Magazine Summer 2022

PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG VOLUME 3 2022 | PCA The Magazine 27 in 2003weweremaking 5,000 cigars a day, and by the time I left weweremaking 105,000 cigars a day. Imanaged the quality control team, and I worked closelywith the sales team. So any issue that would arise got brought directly tomy attention. And it is the same nowwithFoundation. I ama cigar smoker, and I know what it’s like to get a bad cigar. And that’s the last thing I would want any Foundation customer to experience, so I work as hard as possible tomake sure that doesn’t happen. Luckily I’ve got a great teamon the production floor at AJ Fernandez, andAbdel Fernandez is himself also a stickler for quality control.” TheOlmec is Cuban soft box pressed and shipped without cellophane. “I don’t like quadrado, which is really square-pressed.We press the Olmec the old traditional way, using slots andmolds. And you will notice right away that I don’t do cellophanewith theOlmec,” Melillo says. (The company’s Tabernacle line also comes uncellophaned.) He explains, “I ampersonally not a huge fan of cellophane. Retailers like cello, but inmy opinion uncellophaned cigarsmarry and age better. At any rate, to helpmitigate possible T H E B L E N D will find an image on the cedar when you open theOlmec box, an image of the oldest cigar that we knowof. I just thought it would be an interesting culture to center around.” Foundation has averaged about one new line per year since inception, and as the company had not released a newcore line since 2019, theOlmec is a development that was due. Melillo says he has beenworking on theOlmec line for a couple of years now. It uses primarily viso and ligero in the fillers, and comes in two different shades of SanAndrés wrapper—claro andmaduro. (Claro is used here in the SanAndrés sense, not to mean a blond leaf, but one just bit lighter than themaduro.) SaysMelillo, “The SanAndrés maduro is thicker and has some additional strength to it. The claro has a bitmore smokiness becausewhen they are curing the tobaccos in the barns they use hardwoods, and the tobacco picks up some of that smokiness. But themaduro spendsmore time in the fermentation pile, which dissipates some of that smokiness.” The tobaccos used in theOlmec are bale-aged for three years before the cigars are rolled, and after rolling they repose in an aging roomuntil they have attained the desiredmoisture, a process that requires 60 to 90 days. SaysMelillo, “Between 12 and 13 percentmoisture content is where youwant the cigars to be.” Melillo developed theOlmec blend sitting in a roomby himself. “WorkingwithAbdel Fernandez, I have access to people and access to the best tobaccos in theworld. But I am the chef. I’ve been blending since my days at DrewEstate, and I’ma pretty good roller. So after inspecting bales upon bales and kind of seeingwhat I wanted to workwith, I sat in a roomfor a week and just rolled different blends. I eventually came up with seven trial blends for Olmec and then tweaked until I found a blend I really enjoyed and didn’t want to put down.”He says if he’s smoking a cigar right down to the band and he doesn’t want the smoke to be over with, “that’s a good tell-tale sign that I’mwhere I want to be.” Melillo attributes the success of Foundation “100 percent” to his particular interest in and study of the science of quality control, whichwas his specialty while heworked at DrewEstate. “When I started at DrewEstate Melillo attributes the success of Foundation ‘100 percent’ to his particular interest in and study of the science of quality control, which was his specialty while he worked at Drew Estate.