Tastes differ

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			Tastes differ For some time now, whenever I light up a cigar, I can?t help looking at the way a thin ring of fire consumes the tobacco leaf, leaving behind a tube of greyish ash. Once a good friend of mine treated me to a Tuscan cigar brought from Italy. It was of a somewhat peculiar shape: bumpy with thick veins and a wrapper leaf that was almost black... It was also hand-made and clipped at both ends, giving it a not particularly attractive appearance. But when I smoked it, I have to admit that the taste and aroma of the cigar were a good deal better than its external appearance would suggest. I don’t know what influenced me to pay greater attention to this cigar (possibly a pause in the conversation, a sip of cognac, or the cigar itself), but as I smoked it, I watched with fascination as the fire turned the dark, oily leaf into an almost white tube of ash with brighter grains on the surface known as pockets of oil. Tobacco is the child of three elements, and in the skilful hands of a master it is converted into the object of my desire. But with the aid of a fourth element, I convert it into a pile of ash. And so I became extremely interested to know how much the colour, texture and density of the ash depends on the state of the cigar before it started to burn. Several years have passed since then, and over that time I have made certain observations. They are: In eight out of ten cases, a cigar with a maduro wrapper leaf produces a firm, even ash without cracks or holes, and what is more, it’s utterly unimportant what sort of tobacco is used for the filling and the binder leaf. Maybe this is due to a much thicker leaf being used for the maduro wrapper leaf, or to the process of fermentation being longer and carried out at a much higher temperature than is usual. Approximately the same ratio applies to cigars that have aged a long time, and it doesn’t matter whether they have been purposely aged by the producer (Vintage, Reserva), or left to lie in the humidor by chance. In the latter case, the light ash is actually much more frequent. Since cigars are my business, Iive a fairly large quantity of them (aged up to six years) that for one reason or another have been kept in the humidor. Some of these are not on the market, some never have been, and some are no longer in production or were only produced as a limited edition. I smoke them periodically, and when I do I pay attention to the characteristics of their ash: even those that in their ‘youth’ were ‘brunettes’ or auburn, seem to get greyer with the years, irrespective of the kind of tobacco used for the wrapper leaf. In the cases that are exceptions to the above, an important role is played by the type of tobacco and its country of origin, and of course the chemical content of the soil, the number of sunny days a year and the proximity of subsoil to the tobacco plantation. Cigars with a colorado wrapper leaf usually produce a darkish, scaly ash. My observations have been confirmed by the producers, who state that in the main the colour of the ash is influenced by the way the first drying after harvesting is carried out, because it is this process of drying that determines the future condition of the wrapper leaf. Thus, for example, Connecticut Shade from the US produces a much lighter ash than the same Connecticut grown in Ecuador, and criollo-98 from the Alejandro Robaina plantations in Cuba is darker than the same sort of tobacco grown in Honduras by Eduardo Fernandez. As for the density of the ash and its texture, with rare exceptions the most important factor is the way the cigar was rolled and at times the degree to which the tobacco was correctly prepared: was, for instance, the vein completely removed and were all damaged and old leaves removed from the filler? by VYACHESLAV KIRSANOV