Modern life infrequently affords us time to slow down, to reduce the pace to a comfortable gait, and deliver short reprieves where nothing takes higher priority than the moment. Few in our number have found a vehicle to consistently provide us with an excuse, or more aptly put the mandate to reclaim the most precious of commodities: time. What could be more important than embracing those elusive anomalies, those fleeting incidents of perfect clarity where the world regains a sense of order, where time loses its momentum, and our spirits reset and reinvigorate. Athletes know that it is not during the periods of greatest exertion that our strength is manufactured, but during times of rest, where muscles rebuild and recover to become stronger for the next challenge in the arena. So it is with our minds. And so it is when one learns the art of enjoying a cigar, a perfect conveyance to take us to that reclamation.
History provides us with numerous examples of great men who knew the quieting properties of the cigar. Winston Churchill, while leading Great Britain through the darkest hours of the Second World War, was to be flown on a bomber/transport aircraft. This, for him, presented a problem. Since it was to be a high altitude flight, oxygen masks would be necessary to breathe in the non-pressurized plane, making smoking impossible. Mr. Churchill arranged to have his oxygen mask altered so that it would allow him to puff away on his cigars and still provide him with air to sustain his life. Ulysses S. Grant, the brave and sometimes grossly under-rated commander of the Union forces during the Civil War and later President of the United States, was said to smoke in excess of twenty cigars a day. He had dozens of boxes transported with him throughout his military campaigns, many received as gifts by the citizenry he served. And few are unfamiliar with the story of President John F. Kennedy who, mere hours before signing the Cuban embargo into law, sent his press secretary Pierre Salinger scurrying into the late night streets of Washington to purchase as many of the President's favorite Petit Upmanns as his resources, tenacity, and good fortune would allow.
Now we come to the fresh, unlit cigar itself. Truly appreciating the artistry required to create this magnificent object and fully enjoying your cigar begins now. Roll it gently between your fingers. Raise it to your nose and take in its myriad aromas.
Knowing the individual components of a cigar is essential to appreciating the quality and understanding of the smoke. A cigar is composed in three parts: filler, binder and wrapper. First, the filler is, as the name suggests, the folded tobacco leaves that fill the center of the cigar. In premium, hand-made cigars, long-leaf filler is blended and used which runs in one solid length from the head, or the end of the cigar from which you smoke, to the foot, the end which is lit. In a well constructed cigar, one of the clues belying its quality is the length and firmness of its ash. The ash should retain its shape, a perfect cylinder, by virtue of the degree of density of its filler. A poorly constructed cigar will have a curling, crumbling and inconsistent ash. If the filler is too tightly packed, the cigar will require more effort to draw than can be reasonably enjoyed. If it is too loosely packed, the cigar will burn unevenly, sometimes referred to as canoeing.
Keeping the filler bunched tightly together is the next component in the construction of the cigar, the binder. Since the flavor of the cigar is impacted by all three elements used in its manufacture, the binder must also be carefully selected for its quality and strength. Finally, the part of the cigar which first greets us when we open a new box or our humidor is the wrapper. As important as it is to the flavor of the cigar, the wrapper provides the first impression, the aesthetic presentation and sense of what is to come. While the wrapper accounts for better than half of the taste, it is 100 percent of the visual aspect which first greets us. Because of its importance, the people who work at wrapping the cigars, the rollers, or torcedors, are the most skilled. Considered by aficionados as true artists, their work is the culmination of decades of sensory development and acuity, from eyes to mind to hand, and ultimately, to the beautifully crafted final product, the cigar.
The well-made cigar should be even in color, venous but not overly so and firm, yet mildly yielding when pressed. It should present a uniformity of color; rich, almost leather-like in its depth with a slight moistness to the touch. Enjoying a cigar should begin far before it's lit. Smoking the cigar is merely the last part, the culminating act and experience in a most satisfying process.
