Day two of the convention started with some Starbucks and an early impromptu meeting with my good friend Yuri Guillen, manager of cigar manufacturing for General Cigar. Yuri is also a great master blender responsible for some of the greatest La Gloria cigars you will ever find. He is also a great guy who was named after a Russian cosmonaut. That is something you don't find too often in the Dominican Republic. Although we weren't scheduled to meet with General Cigar today, I knew the first thing I had to do was visit with Yuri—after lighting up his new La Gloria Series R Black. The new Series R is a very flavorful Nicaraguan puro and I look forward to seeing this one in our stores really soon.

After visiting Yuri, Big Mungo (Steve Mungeer) and I met with a few boutique cigar owners. Not sure how many new boutique brands you will see in our stores, but it sure is fun talking with these guys. They are very passionate about their craft and it is amazing how diverse all of their backgrounds are.

Then I had an opportunity to visit with Sam Leccia. For those who aren't familiar with Sam, he used to work for Oliva and is the blender responsible for their popular Nub and Cain line of cigars. Sam decided to go out on his own and after being out of action for nearly two years due to non-compete reasons, he is now back and has created an amazing cigar line. His Black and White cigars are outstanding and you can definitely look forward to seeing these in our humidors in the near future. I really enjoyed engaging him in conversation about the tobacco and the aging methods he used. I could tell he would have loved to talk about his processes for a lot longer but he had a large group of people that wanted to meet and greet him so we had to say goodbye.

Sam Leccia and I discussing his tobacco

After lunch my next chore was to take the test to become a Certified Tobacconist. The test was a little tougher than I expected, but I am proud to say that I passed. So that makes Steve "Big Mungo" Mungeer and I the only Certified Tobacconists in the State of Florida who don't either work for a cigar company or tobacco only store or lounge. To celebrate we are going to have dinner with the good folks from Drew Estate. That dinner may be worthy of a blog by itself as the guys from Drew can be very colorful. I will have to tell everyone about that tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Long Ashes,

Chris Gwaltney--Follow me on Twitter @chrisgnole