Hometown Hero: Jeremy Reeves

I’ll give you three guesses: 

No, not the football player, though that’s a good guess, they share the same name. 

No, not the guy from Brideshead Revisited. 

And not the 80’s Sherlock Holmes. 

    Jeremy Reeves is a tobacco blender. He’s like a chef, serving up classic old recipes and creating tasty new ones. He is the head blender at Cornell and Diehl (C&D), the last big pipe tobacco manufacturer in the United States.     

    But even when they had serious competition, not long ago, C&D was a cut above the rest. When I say big, I mean relatively big, they won’t be knocking on “Big Tobacco’s” doors anytime soon. Yet they did produce 120,000 pounds of pipe tobacco in 2023, in 150 varieties. I wonder, how many pipe bowls that would fill? Millions, I guess. 

    Anyway, back to Jeremy, he was born in Portales, yes, Portales New Mexico. I had no idea and I don’t know any more about his life in Roosevelt County. Did he grow up here? Did he come here to attend ENMU? Was he whisked away at birth, destined to tobacco greatness, like some smoky Dalai Lama? I just don’t know. 

    I do know that Reeves is in a small school of blenders like Per Jenson, Russ Ouellette, and Rudiger Will, all legends in the field. Reeves and C&D not only produce fine old school tobaccos, they are often thinking of new variations on the theme. They have put out a yearly vintage variety of Virginia tobacco, when they can find a great candidate. A few years back, Reeves made a blend that included honey from his own hives, which was so popular, he had to resort to a larger apiary for the next year’s batch. He is also working on a fitting replacement for Syrian tobacco (a big deal if you smoke a pipe), a variety that has gone commercially extinct. 

    C&D is committed to keeping the old pastime alive and has partnered with a perique farm in Louisiana, a grower in Turkey, and Ireland’s most prominent pipe manufacturer. Despite their international adventures, the lion’s share of C&D’s product is grown, processed, and packaged in the U.S.A. The company does its work in South Carolina. 

    I think Reeves would be the first one to admit he has a dream job. And that’s my point: there is a world of great, attainable occupations out there. If you browse through this blog, you will see New Mexicans who have won the Noble Prize (from Raton), been Treasurer of the United States (Mountainair), that bult a Hotel Empire (San Antonio), and many more. 

    It seems like all the great achievers live in New York City or Los Angeles, but they didn’t come from there, they came from here, wherever here happens to be, even New Mexico. 

    This is all done to make money of course, but for Reeves and his fellow blenders, it is also a labor of love. How often does that happen? 

    {Thanks to the good people at The Humidor, in Portales, who first told me Reeves was from here. And yeah, that Factory Smokes Maduro cigar was pretty darn good.}