这是Cigar Aficionado杂志社的编辑Gregory Mottola参加尼加拉瓜雪茄节的一篇日记。

眼下是烟叶耕种季节的季中，我站在烟叶田里，我的靴子上有一层来自烟叶田的灰尘。无论你往什么方向看去，远处都是连接着地平线的山脉。你深呼吸一下，感受这里干净的空气，可能会想到阳光明媚的纳帕。在这里，你不需要闹钟，因为公鸡会喊醒你。即使在最简陋的咖啡小屋里，有着那种煤渣墙和生锈的波纹屋顶，咖啡仍然很好喝。这就是尼加拉瓜的埃斯特利，我又回来了。

我好久没有来埃斯特利了。我很惊讶这个城市现在变得如此繁忙，泛美公路沿线有很多烟叶田，烟草植株开始发芽了。我来这里是参加尼加拉瓜的Puro Sabor雪茄节。过去两年由于新冠病毒疫情停止了两年。这是第十届雪茄节，和其他雪茄节安排的内容大致相同。白天去雪茄厂和烟叶田实地参观，晚上举办聚会，期间可以领足够多的免费雪茄。我有时候会不按照时间表参观，就像昨天（1月26日），当时我在A.J.费尔南德斯雪茄厂参观。

评估烟叶质量的最好办法就是抽原叶。也就是打开一些正在发酵的烟叶包，拿出一些烟叶卷起来，尽可能的点燃后抽吸。费尔南德斯有一些非常美味的发酵烟叶包，他想卷给我试试。他有一款茄衣烟叶，计划在未来的限量版项目里使用，他从其他的烟叶包里各抽出一些不同的烟叶，卷成一支真正的雪茄。他说这个烟叶混合和他正在研究的一款混合物的比例十分近似。

我抽的这款临时卷制的雪茄十分辛辣，力度很强。我承认，我有点头晕，虽然我吃了一顿很好的早餐。如果你有机会抽一款这样临时卷制的雪茄，你最好要吃饱了饭，才能扛得住。

昨天，雪茄节的派对安排在了STG雪茄厂，这里以生产CAO雪茄而闻名。雪茄节是在格拉纳达（Granada）开幕的，第一个晚上的活动安排在埃斯特利，大多数尼加拉瓜雪茄品牌都是在这个城市生产的。卡诺之花尼加拉瓜朗姆酒是主要赞助商，你几乎在会场的任何角落都可以看见这个品牌。朗姆酒让人精神饱满，服务生将一个长勺子浸入朗姆酒桶，盛出几盎司朗姆酒，高高举起，倒入玻璃杯中。

很多行业人士出席了晚上的派对。J.C纽曼公司的埃里克·纽曼（Eric Newman），尼加拉瓜乔亚雪茄（Joya de Nicaragua）公司的亚历杭德罗·马丁内斯·昆卡（Alejandro Martínez-Cuenca）博士和他的儿子胡安，乔亚雪茄公司是从桑迪诺战争中幸存下来的一家老公司。

因为埃斯特利的酒店不多，所以尼加拉瓜雪茄节邀请的嘉宾和客人不会太多。晚上的派对演出没有其他雪茄节规模大。如果你不喜欢通宵跳舞，有一班早班车可以送你回酒店，你可以早点上床休息，准备第二天的旅行。宿醉之后去旅游肯定没有那么好。

There’s a dusty patina on my boots from the tobacco fields, which are only now approaching mid-season on account of a late start. Mountains are on the horizon everywhere you look, but you’d probably figure that anyway just by taking a deep breath of the clean air. It might remind you of Napa on the sunnier days. You don’t need an alarm clock, as the roosters take care of that. And even in the most modest of coffee shacks—with their cinderblock walls and rusty, corrugated roofs—the coffee is still good. This is Estelí, Nicaragua, and it’s good to be back. 

It’s been awhile since I’ve set foot in this part of the world, and I’m amazed at how busy the city has become and how many tobacco fields have sprouted along the Pan-American Highway. I’m here for Puro Sabor, Nicaragua’s cigar festival, the first one after a two-year hiatus thanks to the pandemic. This is the tenth festival, and like other cigar festivals, it’s arranged in much the same way: factory tours and field trips during the day, a party by night and more cigars than you can carry the entire time. There’s an itinerary to it all, but sometimes I go off script, like yesterday, when I visited A.J. Fernandez at his factory.

One of the best ways to assess tobacco is to smoke it in fuma. That means you unpack a bale of aged tobacco, roll some up, light it the best you can and smoke it. A.J. has some really tasty wrapper hybrids that he wanted me to try, so he pulled them out of inventory. The wrapper is being set aside for a limited-edition project he has planned for the future. First, we smoked the tobacco on its own—sweet, spicy and quite strong. Then, he retrieved some different tobacco out of separate bales and rolled an actual cigar. This was an approximation of a blend he’s working on and it was surprisingly refined. 

You have to be careful when smoking fumas though. The tobacco can still be unexpectedly strong and it’s easy to lose track of how much you’re sampling. I admit, these made me a little dizzy, even though I had a good breakfast of eggs, plantains, beans and cubed cheese, referred to as a desayuno norteño or northerner breakfast. If you ever have the opportunity to smoke a fuma out of a bale, be sure you’re hydrated and fully fed. We headed out to his farms afterward (there’ll be a larger article on that later).

Last night, there was a welcome party for the festival held on the grounds of STG Estelí, the factory known for making CAO cigars. Puro Sabor started in Granada, but this was the first evening in Estelí (where most Nicaraguan cigars are rolled) and Flor de Caña Nicaraguan rum was a major sponsor. The branding was hard to miss, illuminated in big letters nearly everywhere you looked. The rum bar kept things spirited, especially the cask pourer, who brought some theater by dipping a long ladle into a rum barrel, extracting a few ounces of rum and holding it high as he poured it into a glass. 

It should be of no surprise that many people from the cigar industry were in attendance, everyone from Eric Newman of J.C Newman Cigar Co. to Dr. Alejandro Martínez-Cuenca and his son, Juan, both of Joya de Nicaragua, the battle-scarred operation that survived the Sandinista wars. That’s always been the beauty of these festivals. If you don’t get to meet the cigarmakers on one of their factory or field tours, you can often see them at one of the evening parties, which don’t get too crowded. Because the city of Estelí is very limited in hotel capacity, Puro Sabor can only invite so many guests. The show isn’t as large as the others, but it sells out fast. As for the parties, if dancing all night isn’t your thing, there’s an early bus to take you back to your hotel where you can turn in early and rest up for the next morning’s tour. It’s better for a good night’s sleep, and it’s certainly no fun going on a tour with a hangover. Then again, if you duck out early, you never know what you might miss.