Not Just Any
George Liggett keeps tobacconist traditions alive at The Nostalgia Shop. BY JESSICA VAUGHN MARTIN | PHOTOS BY KEITH BORGMEYER
George Liggett was just a boy when he rolled his first cigarette. By the time he was a teen, he was beyond proficient. “I hand-rolled my grandfather’s 100 cigarettes every Sunday,” George says. “Back in the day, there were no chemicals in cigarettes, so that was my job, and that’s why I’ve always been around tobacco and always enjoyed it.” It wasn’t just for pleasure, though; his grandfather was in the business of supplying tobacco to drug stores along the stretch of Highway 40, now Interstate 70, from St. Louis to Wichita. Today, George is not much for cigarettes, which now harbor too many harmful chemicals. But he is quite fond of tobacco. He prefers cigars, and fine ones. The boyhood tobacconist has aged into a tall man who wears a suit and walks with a brass skull-capped cane. You’d be hard pressed to find him without a cigar in his hand, but it’s not always lit. He caps his intake at one a day, if that. “It’s like an orchestra conductor — I’ve gotta have my baton,” he says. George conducts the operations at
The Nostalgia Shop, where, following in his grandfather’s footsteps, he dabbles in the business of tobacco. “This is my 51st year in the business,” he says. “I grew up with it.”
The Golden Trio But George is not only a tobacconist; he's a collector. The inventory in his shop reflects his deep appreciation for life’s finer things, especially a particular golden trio: cigars, antiques, and really good hooch. For more than half a century, he’s traveled from coast to coast seeking out fine selections to share with his fellow collectors and connoisseurs in his shop, the last cigar lounge in Columbia. “The thing about antiques and antiquities: the people that collect antiques and invest in them, they also drink good wine, drink good spirits, eat good food, and visit us,” he says. “It all kind of dovetails together.”
Every so often, George dips a stunted, slender slat of wood into the flame of a candle, and brings it up to the foot of his cigar. “These are Spanish Cedar strips,” he says. He explains that cigars are packed in layers within boxes, and thin sheets of Spanish Cedar are used to separate them. “Most tobacconists throw it away, but I break it into pieces. It’s cheaper than matches, and I don’t want to waste it either.” George will keep you captivated with these tidbits of information, and before you know it, minutes have turned into hours. He has an extensive catalog of memories; he smoothly rattles off stories about meeting and working with big names at antique and cigar shows: Freddy Mercury, Hugh Hefner, Bob Kane, and Jay Silverheels are just a few. He’ll tell you that it’s his work with antiques, specifically for a Smithsonian project, that got him involved in selling cigars and liquor. “As we were buying all the antiques at the shows, I met all these politicians who were sponsors,” he says. “They would find their antiques and then would say, ‘You know, if you go out to California, can you find some wine for me?’’’ He’d found a niche. “Back then, California could only do intrastate not interstate shipping, so I’d go out there and bring it back to D.C. Then it went from fine wines to Kentucky with bourbons; then one day a guy comes up to me, and he said, ‘Can you get this cigar for me?’ and it just all went together. So here I was, delivering the whole gambit, which goes right along with the antique resale.” But it all goes back to those long-ago Sundays spent rolling cigarettes. “This is the heartbeat of the whole business, the tobacco,” George says. “This is the destination point.”
“The thing about antiques and antiquities: the people that collect antiques and invest in them, they also drink good wine, drink good spirits, eat good food, and visit us. It all kind of dovetails together."
The Finer Things
He shows me inside the humidor where all his cigars are stored. It’s a temperature-controlled room set at 70 degrees and designed specifically for this purpose. A soft brick floor, laid with bricks from an old Stephens College building, holds just the right amount of moisture, at least 70%. Moisture is a key component; if a cigar dries out, it’s no good. “I water it every night before I leave,” George says. As the night goes on it absorbs the humidity: It percolates to the ceiling and the fans knock it back down and it keeps the cigars perfectly fresh. A particular set of wood shelves lines the walls inside the humidor. “The only thing a cigar won’t take the flavor of is Spanish cedar,”
George says. “It doesn’t affect the taste of a cigar. But if you put a cigar next to a Hershey bar for 24 hours… this $40 cigar will taste like a $1 Hershey bar. You have to be very selective in what goes in here and how you store it.” In here, you won’t find gas station tobacco or liquor. “We only deal in hard to find, really rare cellared spirits and older wines,” he says. “I can’t compete against grocery stores.” And he’s not trying to. Like George, his clients appreciate the finer things, and finer things take time. “This is just like a good bottle of wine or good bottle of bourbon — gets better as they age,” he says. He tells me cigars take five years to construct, so at a minimum, any cigar is his shop is at least five years old. The best ones have celebrated even more birthdays. “This cigar right here is 20 years old,” he says, holding up a Maduro, a dark, stout cigar. “Or the wrapper is. It takes five years to construct a cigar, so in essence it’s 25 years old.” At 40 years old, The Nostalgia Shop is older than many fine cigars, and throughout its storied history, the address and offerings of this destination point have changed. George and his business partner, Tim Flynn, whom he worked with until 2010, originally opened an antique boutique in Rocheport under the moniker Stone Swan, and after five years, they moved to downtown Columbia, reopening as The Nostalgia Shop. There they stayed for nearly 30 years before George and his wife, Mariel, decided on a more favorable location in the south end of the city. The Liggetts opened the joint venture of The Nostalgia Shop and a restaurant, Grand Cru, on New Year’s Eve, 1999. “We opened it up as a cigar society that served really good food — but the main interest was cigars,” George says. For eight years, the restaurant and shop ran harmoniously, but in 2008, the city’s new nonsmoking ordinance changed things. “That really destroyed the whole thesis of this restaurant,” George says. “Our restaurant did take a hit after that law was put into place. . . . that’s why we were there — we were a cigar society.” The new law meant changes had to be made. The Liggetts completely closed off the smoking section of the restaurant, creating two separate spaces, the restaurant and the cigar lounge. Today, that’s how it still operates. Two couches and a few tables welcome guests. Art, in the form of framed vintage cigar wrappers, signed posters, and stacks of cigar boxes, furnish the room. It’s a place designed for patrons to “relax
Anatomy of a Cigar George Liggett is an expert tobacconist. Here is his breakdown each step of the cigarmaking process. THREE PARTS TO TOBACCO: Filler: A big bundle of tobacco. Binder: Holds it together. Wrapper: One little tiny piece of tobacco — that’s 80% of flavor.
“But first, you’ve got to get a seed and put that in the ground. Then they harvest the leaves, then age them. They put it in big bales, and it as to be in that bale for approximately five years, and rotated every six weeks. Most cigars are five years old — if they do rush them, they’re no good. "All cigars are blended; they’ve always got three different kinds of tobacco. The essence is when all three come together in one flavor. That’s the mark of a great cigar. If they don’t, the taste of the filler overwhelms everything. You don’t want that. You want to get it down to where it marries together, tasting more wrapper than anything. That’s why it has to sit. "It’s an old-fashioned method of preparation. Just takes time. A good bottle of bourbon would be 10 to 15 years old. Wine’s the same way. Time is everything, especially in tobacco. When you realize how good a cigar is, this is all part of the process. So when I see somebody get a very good cigar, take a couple puffs, and put it out, that’s 10 to 12 years gone. "You can relight a cigar as many times as you want, you can leave it overnight, it’s still going to be there until it dries out. That’s the humidity factor—without the humidity, you’re out of business, it tastes like straw.”