Cigar myths

A good cigar is not only clouded in aromatic smoke, but in a mass of legends that it has acquired over the long years of its existence. Less experienced cigar smokers often accept these myths at their face value, regarding them as signs of good taste or procedures that are essential to perform when smoking a cigar. Some of these myths we've tried today to lay to rest.

Myth 1. A cigar should be warmed before smoking.

I have frequently had occasion to notice people spending a long time warming up their cigars before smoking them. Holding the cigar in the fingers of one hand, they run a lighted match along its lower length. And then they turn the cigar over, trying to warm the whole of its surface. Devotees of this process claim that preparatory warming enables them to savour the full taste and aroma of the cigar. Some believe that a warmed cigar provides a better and smoother smoke with a softer flavour.     

 It’s a rather nice myth, isn’t it? Because it all sounds very plausible. But warming a cigar improves neither its flavour nor its aroma; it doesn’t even make the smoke smoother. The only thing you do achieve by carefully warming each square centimetre of a cigar’s surface is – to spoil it. If the flame gets a millimetre closer than the permissible distance from the surface, the outer leaf will start to smoulder. The smouldering can be stopped easily enough, but the taste and aroma of the cigar will be spoilt. This myth, like any other, has a completely logical historical explanation.      

A cigar is rolled by hand: the leaves are pressed tightly together and wrapped in a binder leaf, and only then are they rolled in the wrapper or outer, covering leaf. At one time they used to be glued with gum tragacanth dyed with chicory. These additives naturally spoiled the taste and aromatic qualities of the tobacco. To counter this and get rid of the unpleasant smell of the tragacanth, and to soften the glue, it used to be recommended to warm the cigar a little over a candle. Doing this a smoker ran the risk of spoiling the cigar by burning the wrapper leaves. But the game, in which the superb and completely unspoilt taste of the cigar was at stake, was worth the candle – in the very literal as well as the metaphorical sense. Today there are other techniques in use for rolling cigars, and the rollers only use glue on the cap. Furthermore, the gluing material has changed. In Cuba, for example, they use starch mixed with water and tobacco dust, while in Brazil a local plant is used as a basis for the glue. These substances are odourless and tasteless, so there is no need to warm the cigar before smoking it. Nevertheless, many smokers continue the tradition despite the risk of spoiling their cigars by continuing the myth that this procedure is necessary.

Myth 2. If you dip the tip of a cigar in cognac, it becomes more aromatic.

"That's what Sir Winston Churchill used to do!", people, who believe this tradition, exclaim. They even find that there's something pleasant in the mixture of the cigar aroma and the flavour of cognac on the tip of the cigar. Why? Because they simply don't know that it's just another myth, and that Winston Churchill dipped the tip of his cigar in his cognac for a completely different reason – because he had to.

The fact was that Churchill practically never parted from his cigar. He lit his first cigar over coffee after breakfast, and left his last cigar in the ashtray as he switched off the light in his bedroom. Sir Winston could smoke up to twenty cigars a day – and they weren't small cigars either! Obviously, he derived not only an enormous amount of pleasure from this, but also an enormous number of problems. For example, Churchill suffered from permanent irritation of the lips, brought on by the oils and tars contained in the outer 'wrapper' leaves. This is a pleasant taste, and when you smoke two or three cigars a day, it doesn't last long. But if you practically never take the cigar out of your mouth, it can cause severe irritation. So in order to maintain the pleasure of smoking throughout the day, Sir Winston began wrapping the tip of the cigar in brown paper, the same colour as the cigar. He did this secretly so that no one should draw attention to this strange habit. But, in doing this, Churchill came up against another problem: the taste, which the brown paper left on his lips, was a good deal less pleasant than the usual taste of the tobacco leaves. The way round this problem lay in his glass of cognac. He dipped the tip of his cigar, now wrapped in brown paper, into the cognac with the result that he now tasted cognac on his lips – a far more pleasant business than tasting rough paper and suffering from permanent irritation. Knowing nothing of the reasons that made Churchill dip the tip of his cigar into his cognac, cigar devotees and admirers of that famous 

Englishman began adopting his habit, on the grounds that it supposedly improved the taste of the cigar. In fact, a cigar should have no direct contact with any liquid at all. Even the most expensive cognac will only spoil the taste of a cigar, if the tip of the cigar is dipped into it. It is far more pleasant to drink the cognac and at the same time smoke the cigar. It is only in the mouth that the flavours and aromas of the cigar and the cognac should merge, if real pleasure is to be derived from blending the two.

Myth 3. The finest cigars are rolled on the thighs of sultry mulatto women.

This is perhaps the most beautiful and the most widespread of all the cigar myths. Despite the legend, cigar rolling was traditionally a man's work. Rolling a cigar to the proper degree of tightness requires very strong wrists, which few women have. In Cuba, rolling was always done by men, and the first woman roller to work at the La Africana factory only started at the end of the 18th century. But apart from this, rolling requires a firm, even surface, and the thighs of a shapely mulatto woman have a completely different configuration. The originator of this myth is thought to be Prosper Merimee. When he began writing Carmen, Merimee travelled to Spain to learn more about the Spanish and their way of life. Being a handsome and imposing man, Merimee began an affair with a young Spanish girl. At the time, in the 19th century, Spain was a deeply religious country, and severe punishments could be meted out for attachments out of wedlock, so the lovers were forced to hide their affections. Merimee rented a small flat for assignations with his ladylove, and they would arrive there at different times and depart at different times. 

Extreme caution had to be shown, since the handsome Frenchman was the cynosure of all eyes. Merimee spent many hours in the tiny little room waiting for his inamorata to arrive and for an opportunity to leave after her departure. This would not have been a problem – the hours of waiting were well worth it for the time spent in amorous dalliance with the passionate Spanish girl – had Merimee not been an ardent smoker. He loved cigars and usually bought them every day. But spending so much time in the secret room, he was unable to supplement his stock. A solution to the problem was found by the resourceful Spanish girl. She bought tobacco leaves and, resting on the bed after their heated lovemaking, she would roll cigars for the tired Merimee on her thighs. This was a task at which she proved to be very talented – and the cigars were simply magnificent. Merimee would smoke a cigar that had just been rolled, and then be ready once more for the labours of love... This experience made such an impression on the writer that when he returned to Paris, he told all his friends about it. A few weeks later, it was the talk of the town that the finest cigars were those rolled on the beautiful bare thighs of sultry mulatto women. And it wasn't long before all reference to Merimee and his amorous adventures in Spain had been completely forgotten. But the myth remained. 

Nevertheless, another practice at the cigar factories has only served to encourage this myth. One of the sections at the factory, called the despala, is the place where the main stem of the tobacco leaf is ripped out. At the base of the leaf, these stems can reach a thickness of several millimeters and under no circumstance may they be allowed to get into the cigar filler tobacco: the stem would prevent proper drawing and spoil the taste. As a rule it is women, called despalilladores, who work here. They straighten out the tobacco leaf on their knees and with one quick movement rip out the stem. Hence, perhaps, the myth that the cigars are rolled on the bare thighs of the women. But, sorry to say, they do not roll the cigars, but only tear out the stem. Nor do they do it on their bare thighs, since the tobacco leaves would absorb the sweat and do nothing to improve the aroma of the future cigar. The incident with Merimee must be considered an exception – a cigar, rolled on the thighs of the woman, he had just made love to, would for him have been an especially pleasant experience.

Myth 4. The darker the wrapper, the stronger the cigar.

Many people believe that cigars with a dark outer leaf are stronger than those with a light wrapper. But, contrary to this widely held belief, this is not the case. The strength of a cigar in no way depends on the colour of its wrapper leaf. Experience shows that cigars with almost black outer leaves may be mild just as cigars with light wrappers may be very strong. The colour of a cigar depends upon the sort and the type of the outer leaf that was used to roll the cigar. The world traditionally distinguishes six or seven colours of wrapper leaf: from light green to almost black. But in Cuba, for instance, specialists recognize almost seventy shades. The sort of wrapper leaf used has little effect on the taste qualities and even less on the aroma. The strength of a cigar depends directly on the composition of the filler tobacco. However, a dark wrapper leaf contains far more oils and tar than a light one, and so greater quantities of various substances remain on the lips when it's being smoked, one of which is nicotine. For this reason, a cigar with this kind of wrapper is thought of as being stronger.

Myth 5. The thickness and length of a cigar affect its strength

There's a widespread belief that those, who like a mild cigar, should smoke long, thin ones. Actually, those, who like a mild taste and a subtle aroma, should choose a thicker cigar. A cigar with a wider diameter has a better chance of losing heat, thereby giving a much cooler smoke. Thin cigars lose heat more slowly making them seem hotter and fiercer. The length of a cigar has absolutely no effect on its strength. The length of a cigar only relates to the time taken to smoke it and, consequently, to the length of the pleasure we derive. And as we smoke, we notice that the nearer the hot tip gets to our lips, the hotter the cigar becomes. This is because the smoke has less distance to travel and, consequently, less chance to lose heat.

Myth 6. A cigar is a sign of a 'bourgeois' life-style.

This myth appeared in our country at the dawn of the communist period and has persisted almost to the early 1990s. The enemies of Soviet power – the capitalists and the slave-drivers of the working class – were always depicted in the propaganda banners that were put out by the Soviet ideological system with cigars in their mouths. And the people, brought up on socialist-realist models, thought that the cigar was as much an oppressor of the ordinary worker as was the person in the evening suit that was smoking it. In the mid twentieth century this myth was faced with a strange paradox. After the victory of the socialist revolution in Cuba, cigars appeared in the Soviet Union – imported from the fraternal Island of Freedom – and many of the Soviet political elite began to enjoy smoking them. But the people continued to regard the cigar as the bourgeois affectation of Western despots. 

Despite the fact that everyone knew that in Cuba cigars were smoked by Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara and even Manuel, the ordinary worker, who collected tobacco on one of the Vuelta Abajo plantations, the cigar remained an unambiguous sign... Quite wrongly, of course. Finally, of course, we got over this peculiar myth. To smoke a cigar you do not have to be a Rockefeller or beat your black slaves. All you have to do is love life and know how to enjoy it.

Cigar Clan 1'2004 vol.1. Eldar Tuzmukhamedov