Ferio Tego: Rising From the (Cigar) Ashes
The logo of the new cigar company Ferio Tego shows Hercules busy at the second of his 12 labors, the slaying of the many-headed Hydra of Lerna.
“It comes from our family coat of arms,” says Michael Herklots, “and while there are different translations of ‘Ferio Tego’ the one we like is ‘Strike and Defend.’”
“We” is Herklots and his Ferio Tego partner, Brendon Scott. If not Hercules, the mythic Phoenix rising from the ashes might have worked for the pair. Both worked at Nat Sherman International before the cigar portion of the venerable brand went up in proverbial smoke in September 2020, when the classy mid-town Manhattan Townhouse of the legendary tobacco company literally shuttered its doors.
Herklots, attempting to make a long business story short, related how Sherman had been acquired in 2017 by Altria, the parent company of Phillip Morris USA. But eventually Altria decided the retail cigar end of the Nat Sherman business just wasn’t core to its long-term goals.
“To their credit, they did not just close us, but allowed us to be put up for sale,” Herklots says.
A deal deep into the works was upended by that modern Hydra, COVID-19. Nat Sherman was on track to be sold as late as February 2020, but the pandemic’s arrival canceled those plans. Company officials then decided to close down the cigar end of the business.
“So, we began what we called a dignified liquidation,” Herklots says. “To be honest it was really kind of special and cathartic the way we went out of business. I can’t tell you how many essential workers came by the Townhouse — fire trucks, garbage trucks, paddy wagons all pulling up in front of the store — all New York’s greatest able to come in and buy some of cigars they’ve known and loved for 30 years at a time when they really needed it most.”
As all that was happening, Scott and Herklots would find themselves alone in a New Jersey conference room, smoking cigars, sipping Scotch, and thinking: this sucks, this just sucks.
A Cigar By Any Other Name
Herklots was a punkish 18-year-old drummer studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston when a roommate inveigled him into a cigar bar for the first time. If not quite as dramatic as Saul on the road to Damascus, it was conversion enough. After puffing away on his first cigar — he remembers it as an Ashton Classic Panatella — he set out on the road that 23 years later has him running his own cigar company.
Michael Herklots.
Raven Adams
It didn’t happen via pixie dust. Herklots fairly quickly landed a part-time job selling cigars at a Boston kiosk. By May 2002 he was selling cigars at a Davidoff shop in Manhattan. Within two months he was the top salesman. By 2011 he was hired by the Sherman family to revitalize its 80-year-old cigar brand, and he succeeded beyond expectations. In the process he became, quite simply, a celebrity of the cigar world, easily mixing with the movers and shakers of Manhattan’s wine and food worlds.
In person, Herklots is no wallflower. He has a charismatic charm that is a lively blend of sophistication and unexpurgated candor. When he started out at Davidoff, he was a wiry young guy with a Backstreet Boys haircut and five earrings in one ear. At 41, he’s still wiry, but he’s now a fashion plate, casual at home with his wife and two daughters, but clad in bespoke Italian suits and shoes when fronting for the company.
His partner, Scott, is the back of the house finance guy, and also the golfer of the pair, if infrequently while his two children were growing. He could be counted on for charity tournaments or showing up at the 19th hole with cigars to meet friends at the Ramsey Golf and Country Club in New Jersey. Now that the kids are grown, he’s hoping to find his game again.
“Michael and I had put our heart and soul into Nat Sherman,” Scott says.
So, during the year it took to shut down, they began talking over the idea of trying to acquire the Sherman cigar brands — the Timeless, Metropolitan and Epoca blends — in hopes of keeping them between the fingers of fans. On the time-honored theory of no harm in asking, they eventually drew up a letter of intent.
“Starting with Timeless in 2012 — that was the first blend I created for the company to help bring it back — and all of the blends after that was my work, Herklots said. “I was basically a ghost writer, the stories I created in the form of cigars that I sold and watched people enjoy, all with the Nat Sherman name on the masthead. Which was as it should be. But imagine at the end that all these great stories that you wrote were all of a sudden going to be taken out of circulation, never to be seen again. As an artist, that’s a hard pill to swallow. So, we thought it would be worth one shot to see if Altria would consider allowing us to continue that work. And the answer was a resounding yes.”
Their wives were on board. “They saw it as a great opportunity,” Herklots says. “They basically just said, ‘Don’t f--- it up.’”
Altria continues to own the Nat Sherman line of cigarettes, but the old Sherman blends are now reappearing with the band “Exclusively for Ferio Tego,” from the suppliers Herklots had worked with for many years in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Honduras. With various blends for each style and different sizes, the line will eventually span about 40 different cigars, plenty to keep humidors or golf bags well-stocked.
Herklots has also created two limited-release Ferio Tego blends, the Elegancia and the Generoso. He says, “The Generoso is the darker style of the two — by no means an ass kicker, but it’s fuller, a bit more intense. The Elegancia is milder, but not mild — it has a very full body, and a really nice flavor, more Chardonnay than Pinot Grigio, more creme brûlée than vanilla ice cream.”
Herklots is adept at pairing cigars with wine and spirits. Those striking golf balls and trying to defend par may find their swing oil tends more toward beer. Herklots has that covered, too: “Lately I’ve been enjoying New Belgium’s Voodoo Ranger Imperial IPA. It is one of the coolest, most cigar-friendly beers going.”