San Andres Tuxtla
The dark leaf from the Tuxtlas that turned the world's cigars maduro.
San Andres Tuxtla sits in a volcanic basin in southern Veracruz, founded after an eruption of the San Martin volcano in 1530 pushed people out of Ixtlan and into the valley. The Los Tuxtlas region is one of the wettest parts of Mexico, hot and humid year round, with deep dark soil heavy in organic matter. It is not ground that produces finesse. It produces mass, sugar and oil, which is exactly the raw material for a dark, sweet, heavily fermented wrapper, and it has been the centre of Mexico's fine tobacco since the nineteenth century.
Cuban and German immigrants arrived around 1830 and recognized what the climate would do. The Turrent family began growing cigar tobacco at San Andres in 1880 and has farmed there for six generations. The local negro San Andres, also called San Andres criollo, descends from seed left behind when a Dutch company gave up its Mexican operations, and it is now the region's signature: near-black when fermented out, thick, oily and pebbled, giving cocoa, coffee, dried plum and damp earth with a peppery edge. It is thick enough to slow a burn and sweet enough to be tasted on the lips.
For most of the twentieth century Mexican cigars were sold as Mexican cigars, and Te-Amo, launched in 1966 and acquired by the Turrents in 1972, carried the category into the United States on the strength of about a hundred and seventy shops in the New York area alone. The maduro boom of the 2000s and 2010s changed the business entirely. San Andres negro stopped being a Mexican product and became a component: today it is one of the most widely used maduro wrappers in the premium trade, on cigars rolled in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic that never mention Veracruz on the band.
The Tuxtlas grow on dark, heavy volcanic soil unusually rich in organic matter, under high heat and heavy rain, and the plant responds with a thick, oily, high-sugar leaf. Fermentation is where the region is made or lost: properly worked, San Andres negro turns sweet, cocoa-heavy and deep; rushed, it keeps a sour, faintly ammoniated bite that no amount of ageing hides. Upper primings carry the darkest colour and most sugar and become wrapper; lower and middle leaf is milder and commonly used as binder, where its thickness helps hold a bunch. The region also grows habano criollo selections in lighter shades for claro and colorado wrappers.
San Andres is a tobacco town in the agricultural sense: fields, curing barns, fermentation sheds and a calendar set by the crop rather than by a factory shift. Cigars are sold openly on the plaza and along the highway, and the local trade has always run alongside the export business rather than behind it. The wider Tuxtlas are better known in Mexico for the lakeside town of Catemaco and its long-standing tradition of curanderos, which brings a different kind of visitor to the same roads. The Olmec sites at Tres Zapotes are a reminder that this valley has been farmed and settled for three thousand years.