Cigarmaker stops by Woodbridge store

There are few quiet moments as Rocky Patel works a group of people. He chats with customers, pausing occasionally to enjoy one of his cigars. He mills about at Old Virginia Tobacco Company’s Woodbridge store, moving between the wafts of cigar smoke and smoke from a nearby industrial-sized smoker.

This is his life.

“I am,” he said, “the marketing department.”

And the blender. And the tobacco buyer. And the decision maker. The company is his; the script letters on each cigar band are his initials.

The success of Patel’s cigar company has come from the popularity of his products and a relentless schedule that keeps him on the road pushing those products. His visit to Woodbridge on Saturday — the last of a three-day trip through Northern Virginia — precedes trips to Chicago, Las Vegas and New York. And that doesn’t count the time he spends at his factories in Honduras and Nicaragua.

It all adds up to an average of 320 days per year on the road.

“People ask me, ‘What’s my home?’ I say ‘American Airlines,’” Patel said with a smile that comes with the re-telling of an oft-told joke.

His constant push for personal marketing has always been a stable of Patel’s company. But not so for his company’s success.

In a 2008 interview with Cigar Aficionado, he recounted the early days. Initially, Patel was just an investor. Working as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, he was approached about putting money into a cigar company. But he said he always had a grander vision for the company.

It was a tough time to enter the industry, which was dealing with a glut of manufacturers hoping to catch a piece of the cigar boom in the 1990s. In those first few years, there were plenty of questions of whether the company would be viable.

Patel kept working at his craft, and his cigars gained in popularity. One big break came last year, when Cigar Aficionado gave his Decade Torpedo a 95 rating on a 100-point scale — a classic. “Balanced and elegant,” the magazine wrote.

“The 95 rating shows that it’s one of the best cigars on the market. It’s one of the highest ratings ever given by Cigar Aficionado,” Patel said. “The brand itself has been gaining a lot of momentum over the last five years. It’s become on of the top three or four brands in the country. And the sales tell all. We spend a lot of time on the quality control and the consistency.”

“Some cigar manufacturers, they do kind of the same thing. Rocky’s all across the board,” said Jon Palmer, a sales associate with Old Virginia Tobacco Co. “Everything from mild to full-bodied.”

Patel said his company has largely avoided feeling the full effects of the global recession. There are other matters of greater concern, namely the State Children’s Health Insurance Program — S-CHIP — which raises taxes on all tobacco products to fund a program that aids low-income children whose medical expenses are not covered by other programs or private insurance.

But distress was not in the air on Saturday during Patel’s visit. He smiled and listened while mingling with a diverse crowd that crossed age, gender and racial lines. Most of the people in attendance were regular customers of the store, Palmer said.

One such person was Clayton Daughtry of Manassas.

“If you were in the Army, an officer, you’d say he’s a soldier’s soldier,” said Daughtry, a soldier himself. He works for the Army at the Pentagon. “He’s just a regular guy — a famous guy that’s regular.”

Daughtry first met Patel when the cigar maker was traveling through Kansas City, Mo., when Daughtry lived there.

It was just another stop on the never-ending, whirlwind tour.