With a passion that stems from her father, and his father before that, Indiana Ortez is embracing her family roots and traditions in her family’s illustrious tobacco business. The Ortez interests in the industry date back to the 1960s, and the premium tobacco fields that her grandfather began cultivating in Jalapa, Esteli, and Condega. Indiana began her career in the tobacco world over two years ago, giving her father, Omar Ortez, much pride as she joined the family business and began spending time with him at his factory. It was there that she enjoyed hours of happiness and learned priceless lessons about life and the craft. She began to understand his tireless passion for industry which she recalled from childhood days when he’d return from work wearing the aroma of tobacco like a shirt, and began to cultivate her own. Inspired by the thousands of ways of blending tobacco, she’s forging a path from the family Ortez, creating cigars that honor her heritage.
We are pleased to introduce Father Daughter, by Indiana Ortez. Encouraged by her father and the bond between them, she created a cigar with the perfect blend and balance between his taste for tobacco and her own. To create this coordinated dance on the palate, Indiana sought a mixture of robustness and subtlety, and her craftsman father’s approval.
“After various days of perfecting the blend, and finding what I considered what was ideal, my father sampled it. I was nervous, because it was my first blend supervised by “the boss”- a man who had dedicated his whole life to this task. During the first five puffs, my father did not show any expressions on his face, which made me even more nervous. By the second sample he said, with a sincere smile on his face, “This is it, hija. This is the one.”
The result is Father Daughter by Indiana Ortez. With sweet and high combustion notes of tobacco from the Jalapa Valley, striking aroma and flavors from the leaves of Condega, and a body and strength coming from the harvest in Esteli, it’s a cigar that blends past and present, mixes the strength of age with a lightness of youth, and honors her father, grandfather, and the generations of traditions created, and those still to come.
Says Indiana Ortez, well on her way to becoming a master of the tobacco craft, “I encourage you to enjoy this cigar. Listen to the story behind it. Analyze it. And learn to smoke it, so you are always listening to the tales of tradition within the seductive crackle of burning tobacco. Father and daughter. Friends and Fire. No more.”