Cigars Are a Natural and Artisanal Product
Buzzwords like “natural” and “artisanal” are overused in today’s vernacular, but premium, handmade cigars have truly earned the right to flaunt these credentials. They are made of one thing and one thing only—tobacco. Pure, unadulterated tobacco. Not a single leaf is chemically treated or artificially altered for taste. Everything from flavor to color is achieved through natural means—and that’s part of the cigar’s inherent beauty.
Few consumable products are so natural. Perceptible flavors, whether sweet or spicy, are naturally occurring. The various alluring shades of brown are achieved through an organic process free of dyes or ripening accelerants. There are no preservatives to increase shelf life and no sweeteners, artificial or natural. Such additives and chemicals are the domain of cigarettes and machine-made cigars, which are mass-produced in the billions.
On the craft side, rolling the perfect handmade cigar is an artisanal skill that takes many years to master fully. Blending tobacco is as much art as it is science, and because tobacco is subject to the whims of nature, the blender must be able to work effectively with an ingredient that can change from year to year due to crop variations.
Like wine, some vintages are better than others. Still, cigarmakers will do everything in their power to ensure that their product is consistent, even though crop quality is highly dependent on the weather. Consistency, however, isn’t the same thing as cloning, and there will always be minute variations from cigar to cigar. No two premium cigars will be exactly alike as with any handmade product. The finest, most sincere cigars are natural expressions of both the cigarmaker and the soil from which the tobacco was grown.
Two Hundred Pairs of Hands
It’s often said that 200 pairs of hands touch your cigar before it makes it to your humidor. Some claim the number is even higher. Suffice to say, every time you light up a cigar, many, many people with many different skills all contribute to bringing you the ultimate handmade product.
How a Cigar is Made
It starts with seed selection and greenhouse cultivation. Cigar tobacco begins as a tiny seed, most often planted in a tray and grown in a greenhouse. Once the seedlings are a few inches high, they’re transplanted to the fields where they can flourish. At full height and maturity, the leaves are removed by hand, harvested, and hung in a curing barn to dry and turn brown. That’s a few dozen hands before the tobacco has even left the farm.
The cured tobacco is then taken to a facility, unpacked, and piled up for fermentation. When fermentation is complete, the tobacco pile is separated and laid on drying racks to air out. Then, it’s all repacked and stowed for aging. After a few years, the aged tobacco is unpacked again, rehydrated in a special misting room, and categorized for color. That’s a few more dozen hands.
The outer wrapper leaves will also undergo destemming or despalillo, a process where the thick, central vein is removed from the leaf. Sometimes that step is done completely by hand, other times, the tobacco is fed through a stripping machine. A worker will remove part of the stem by hand for filler, leaving the rest intact. More hands.
Don’t forget the rolling process, which requires appointed factory workers to dole out the proper proportions of aged tobacco to the rollers each day. The torcedor takes his pile of leaves back to his rolling table and recreates the cigar according to the cigarmaker’s blend, bunching and rolling each cigar by hand. The blend is formulated of exacting proportions of very specific tobaccos to impart a very particular smoking experience—a formulation that puts more hands on your cigars.
Finished cigars are sorted for color consistency, then sent to the aging room. Finally, they’re banded up, boxed, and sent out. This is the basic chronology of how a cigar is made. There are, of course, plenty of other quality-control steps that vary from operation to operation, and nearly all are completed entirely by hand, but the point is this: a single hand-rolled cigar is a massive human effort that requires hands-on expertise on every level.
