Cigar
Tightly rolled bundle of dried, fermented tobacco for smoking.
What is Cigar? A cigar is a rolled bundle of dried and fermented tobacco leaves made to be smoked, built from three distinct components: filler at the core, a binder leaf that holds the bundle together, and a wrapper leaf on the outside. The wrapper is typically the most expensive part and does much of the work in shaping aroma and appearance. Modern production is concentrated in the Caribbean and Central America, with the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Honduras as the dominant origins, joined by Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, the Canary Islands, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Cameroon. The Dominican Republic alone accounts for roughly 44% of the most-traded cigars in the world.
Anatomy, Shapes and Sizes
Every premium cigar is a small piece of architecture. The filler is the core tobacco blend and may be 'long filler' (whole leaves running the length of the cigar, favored in handmade production) or 'short filler' (chopped scraps, more typical of machine-made cigars). The binder holds the filler in shape, and the wrapper finishes the cigar visually and aromatically. Wrapper colors run from Candela, a very light green, to Oscuro, a near-black leaf; darker wrappers generally lean sweeter, while lighter wrappers tend to read drier on the palate.
Shape and dimension are described by two systems. Cigars split into two families: parejo, with straight parallel sides, and figurado, with tapered or irregular silhouettes such as the torpedo, pyramid, perfecto, and cheroot. Diameter is given as a ring gauge, measured in 64ths of an inch, so a 50 ring gauge equals 50/64 of an inch. Common parejo formats include the Robusto at about 4 7/8 inches by 50 RG, the Corona at roughly 5 1/2 by 42, the Toro at about 6 by 50, and the Churchill at around 7 inches by 47 to 50, a large format named after Winston Churchill himself.
Origins, Production and Tobacco Craft
Europeans first observed cigar smoking in 1492, when Columbus's crew encountered the Taino people of Cuba. The practice traveled back across the Atlantic with returning sailors, and the English word 'cigar', drawn from the Spanish cigarro, came into general use around 1730. From there the cigar evolved into a serious agricultural craft tied closely to a handful of growing regions with the right soils and climate.
Turning a leaf into a finished cigar takes patience. Tobacco is first cured for roughly 25 to 45 days using a combination of heat and shade, then fermented slowly under controlled temperature and humidity so that harsh compounds break down and the flavors and aromas characteristic of fine cigars develop. Beyond the Caribbean and Central American heartland, the United States once played a major role too: Ybor City in Tampa, Florida, was a major American cigar-making hub, peaking in 1929 with over 500 million cigars rolled in a single year.
