The King Street Emporium

Fuente Fuente Opus X

By Arturo Fuente

A Parisian retailer told Carlos "Carlito" Fuente Jr. in the 1980s that he wasn't a real cigar maker, just someone who assembled tobaccos from elsewhere. The comment stuck with him, and he traced the insult to its root: conventional wisdom held that the Dominican Republic couldn't grow quality wrapper leaf, so Fuente had no choice but to source it from other countries like everyone else. He set out to prove that wisdom wrong, planting Cuban seed Corojo tobacco on a plantation in the Bonao region he named Chateau de la Fuente. In 1995 the first Fuente Fuente OpusX cigars went on sale, the first true Dominican puro ever made, and the buzz was immediate enough that Fuente initially limited sales to select retailers east of the Mississippi, with store owners capping purchases at two cigars per customer. The wrapper, binder, and filler are all grown at Chateau de la Fuente, a dark oily Corojo Cuban seed wrapper over Dominican binder and filler that blends four or five different tobaccos, with most of the filler leaves pulled from the top of the plant for power and body. The wrapper leaf is never sold to other companies and any unused tobacco from the farm is destroyed, which keeps the blend entirely exclusive to Fuente's own lines. Full in body. Made at Tabacalera A. Fuente y Cia in the Dominican Republic.