Often when I would see this type of error it would be when something silently drops TCP packets (rather than sending a RST). This is one way to configure a firewall, and it's indistinguishable from high latency. Hence the difference in behavior. If the address was unroutable, or immediately closed the connection, it would fail quickly (and presumably for the OCSP check, it would be skipped immediately). But when packets are silently dropped, it's up to the client to decide how long to wait for an ACK, which might cause a hang.
I've seen an identical problem where Chrome would hang for minutes when loading sites, and it was because I was in a firewalled environment that was outright dropping packets to Chrome's OCSP server.