Taste And Flavor
Taste and Flavor
by Michael Frank
A love affair with cigars is like most affairs of the
heart. We swoon over the beauty and elegance, but we
never really know what makes us love--and we don't want
to. To overanalyze a cigar, or a mate, is to destroy the
mystery. That's the analogy cigar gurus such as Ernesto
Carrillo (maker of La Gloria Cubana and El Rico Habano)
and Carlos Fuente Jr. (Arturo Fuente, among other
brands) use when they reluctantly discuss the
relationship between cigars and taste. Their
disinclination to quantify their lifelong romance with
the leaf is shared by most cigar aficionados. While we
want to know what makes a cigar taste great, we don't
want our pleasure reduced to a chemical analysis of
smoke and tobacco. In essence, we want the romance to
continue with each new cigar encounter.
Still, despite the romance, Fuente and Carrillo, along
with Hendrik Kelner (president of Tabacos Dominicanos,
which makes Avo, Davidoff, Griffin's, and Troya) make no
claim that a good cigar cannot be differentiated from a
bad one via objective analysis. All of these men were
born and raised in the tobacco business. (Fuente says he
was brought to the factory when he was three days old
and later made forts in the giant bales of leaves as a
boy. According to Fuente, the doctor who delivered him
was paid in cigars.) And all agree that there are
certain constants, that structure and the ingredients of
any cigar determine its taste.
Talking about the taste of cigars requires that you sit
down with a great cigar and smoke it from beginning to
end. Kelner, Carrillo and Fuente advocate this method
because they have all learned by experience, by doing
and by smoking. And to them, there is more to it than
putting a cigar in your mouth-taste means using all of
your senses. Sight, touch, smell, taste and, yes, even
hearing play a role in cigar smoking. Kelner and Fuente
say that a cigar should be listened to as you roll it
between your fingers to determine the moisture content
of the wrapper.
Sight and touch go hand in hand. The first thing you do
when you remove a cigar from a box, or from your
humidor, is inspect it. The appearance and feel of the
cigar wrapper tell a story about taste. And while
wrapper alone cannot make or break a cigar, according to
Fuente, "the wrapper plays an important part in the
taste because it embodies the overall personality of the
cigar. It allows the cigar to have texture and beauty."
Even before you light up, seeing and feeling a wrapper
with nice silky oil-indicative of proper
humidification-and without visual blemishes can give you
certain expectations, though wrapper appearance will
vary depending upon where the leaf was grown.
The best wrappers from Cuba are indeed like silk, with
exceedingly close cell structure; they don't feel like
vegetable matter because their surface is so smooth.
They also possess an elasticity and strength often
lacking in wrapper leaves from other countries. By
contrast, Cameroon wrapper shows oil in its bumpy
surface, called tooth in the tobacco industry. These
bumps are a good sign that great taste and aroma will
follow, even if the texture of the leaf isn't silky.
Wrappers from Connecticut and Ecuador are somewhat close
in surface texture, though not in color. Better
Ecuadoran leaf has less tooth, is smooth to the touch
and has a matte-like appearance. Connecticut wrapper
shows more color depth, a bit more tooth and a nice
shine.
Despite the differences in the way oil appears, oil in
wrapper leaf indicates that the cigar has been well
humidified (oil secretes from tobacco at 70 to 72
percent humidity) and that the smoke should be
relatively cool. A cool smoke is a tastier one, because
your nose and mouth can pick up more nuance than just
hot, carbonized tobacco flavor.
If you don't see any cracks or ripples in the surface of
the wrapper leaf, you also know that the cigar wasn't
exposed to cycles of over-humidification and excessive
dryness. This, too, is important. If the cigar is forced
through rapid cycles of expansion and contraction, the
internal construction is destroyed. A cigar with
internal damage will smoke unevenly, or "plug," drawing
unevenly. This may still occur due to faulty
construction, but your chances are better with a perfect
wrapper than with a broken one.
After lighting your cigar, you can make additional
visual evaluations. First, look at the ash. According to
most cigar experts, a white ash is better than a gray
one. This is not merely an aesthetic issue, either. "The
soil produces white ash-the better soil gives whiter ash
and more taste," says Fuente. He says that certain
manipulations of soil can be made through fertilization,
but if too much magnesium (a key ingredient in producing
white ash) is added to the mix, the ash will flake, and
nobody wants a messy cigar, even if the ash is white.
Of course, ash is not something you taste or smell, but
a gray ash indicates that the soil was lacking certain
key nutrients, leaving the cigar with insubstantial
body, or perhaps little complexity-resulting in a lesser
smoke.
A final visual cue is the burn rate. You can taste a
cigar that is burning improperly because, according to
Kelner, an uneven burn "distorts the flavor of the
blend." Simply put, a cigar is designed to burn evenly.
A cigar is constructed to burn different tobaccos
throughout the length of the smoke. A cigar may start
off mild, grow stronger, or change in some other way,
and these changes are attributable to the location of
different tobaccos in the cigar structure. An uneven
burn sets these intended taste changes on edge. Perhaps
a "tunneling" effect will occur, with one side of the
cigar burning while the other stagnates. If this occurs
the draw will be uneven, the smoke may become very
strong, and the taste in your mouth becomes overwrought
with a single signature-and a one-dimensional taste is
far less interesting than a multifaceted one.
Taste and smell are almost inseparable sensations. While
some people may have more highly developed perceptions
of taste or smell, nearly everyone agrees that clogged
sinuses hamper their ability to taste. Basically, when
you can't smell, half of your "taste buds" are missing,
especially in cigar smoking, because you're not eating
the smoke, but smelling it.
To make a good-tasting cigar, then, cigar makers are
very concerned about the smoke and the aroma it
delivers. Carrillo maintains that aroma and taste are
inseparable: "It doesn't have to mean strong or mild
[aroma], but it doesn't work if I don't get any taste
from a cigar." To Carrillo, there's no quantifying cigar
taste; it either exists or it doesn't.
By contrast, Kelner says that taste, at least the act of
tasting, is highly quantifiable. "The sense of taste is
located mainly on the tongue and to a lesser degree on
the palate. There exist only four basic tastes: sweet,
sour, salty and bitter. Everything else is either a
combination of these four or a combination of taste and
aroma." Fuente agrees, at least in part, with Kelner's
claim. Fuente says that when he talks with other tobacco
men, he doesn't use what he calls elaborate "food
language" (coffee, chocolate, nutty, etc.) to describe
cigars. "We use words like, acidic, salty, bitter,
sweet, bite, sour, smooth, heavy, full-bodied, rich and
balanced."
Regardless of the language used to describe and evaluate
cigars, coming up with a blend of tastes that works
requires many different types of tobacco. And to reach a
consistent taste, one that stays the same year after
year, is the most difficult task for any cigar maker.
Explaining what happens to tobacco over several growing
seasons, Fuente says that no two leaves of tobacco are
the same, and no two cigars can be exactly the same year
to year. "Every year, if you were to go by the numbers
[to use strict ratios of the same tobacco blend in any
given cigar], that cigar would be completely different."
Any tobacco, even tobacco grown on the same spot,
changes constantly.
Kelner says that cigar makers use several different
tobaccos for two reasons. The first reason is to
compensate for nature-which alters tobacco leaf taste
from year to year, plot to plot and plant to plant-but
the second is to vary taste. Elaborating, Kelner says,
"It is possible to obtain an agreeable flavor from only
one tobacco type, but a single taste will make the smoke
tiring." Kelner notes that to ensure an interesting
taste variety, as well as a consistent flavor over the
years, "a good blend must be made with tobaccos from
different [geographic] zones, varieties, grades and
harvests, so that the cigar will be complete and
balanced." Agreeing with Kelner, Fuente enthuses that,
like a great chef, a cigar craftsman must have a variety
of tobacco ingredients with which to work: "If you give
him just salt and pepper, he's really limited. But if
you give him different amounts of herbs and spices, even
if you have a bad crop of pepper one year, you could
adjust the balance so the consumer wouldn't recognize
that there was something different."
Fuente, Kelner and Carrillo often talk about creating
cigars that make us believe in an unalterably consistent
blend, but what they are actually saying is that the
consumers' taste buds are always being fooled. Two Red
Delicious apples never taste exactly the same, but we've
become accustomed to, and believe in, a certain taste
attached to that piece of fruit. Likewise, no two cigars
taste exactly the same, but adding a stronger tobacco
one year and a weaker one the next to achieve the same
"balance" creates the illusion of consistency-no such
thing ever really exists.
Achieving this balance is also complex; there are an
infinite number of variables that can alter the taste of
any blend. Kelner categorizes just ten: soil, tobacco
variety, climate, ground condition, curing, the
harvester, fermentation, aging, manufacture of the cigar
and the humidity of the cigar. But not all makers agree.
The list of variables inevitably expands and soon
becomes unfathomable. The only agreements among makers
seem to be that a wrapper has the greatest potential
impact on nuances (Fuente calls these "overtones" and
"undertones") of taste, and filler (the heart of the
cigar) determines overall strength or weakness (or
fullness of body). "With a neutral wrapper," such as
Cameroon, according to Kelner, "it can be compensated
for with a filler and binder that has more flavor and
especially more aroma." Kelner says that "Connecticut
wrapper [contributes] to about 20 percent of the flavor,
with Cameroon at about 5 percent." Of course he
qualifies his numbers, saying that a stronger binder and
filler will have a dissipating effect on this 20 percent
figure, and a cigar with a larger ring gauge will be far
less affected by wrapper taste: the ratio of filler to
wrapper is far greater in a Churchill than in a
Lancero-sized cigar.
Kelner, whose approach to cigars is somewhat more
analytical than that of his peers, also quantifies the
contribution of binder and filler to the taste and aroma
of any cigar. Kelner says that within normal
parameters-weather, leaf quality, etc.-binder
contributes no less than 20 percent to the taste of a
cigar, and filler, no less than 40 percent. Again,
Kelner cautions not to take these numbers too literally.
It's a question of many variables, and to extrapolate
from these figures that a cigar is like a puzzle would
be a gross misinterpretation. It is better to let the
numbers speak for themselves: a binder, even one of
relatively weak tobacco, will have some impact on the
quality of the smoke, while the filler will determine
overall strength; the wrapper will add a great deal of
character, or not much at all, depending upon its
condition, seed origin and type.
Other factors that are at least somewhat agreed-upon are
aging and construction.
A good cigar has a range and variety of tastes, and one
way to alter those tastes is with different ages of
tobacco. According to Fuente, aging makes a smoother,
richer cigar. "If you get a cigar right from a roller's
table you won't find that." But Fuente says that the
common people of Cuba smoke freshly rolled cigars, and
he makes no claim that an aged cigar tastes better.
Rather, it simply makes the cigar taste "rounder," with
less sharp tobacco taste. On this point, both Carrillo
and Kelner agree (especially the former, whose cigars
are often the "youngest" commercially available in this
country), though Carrillo is perhaps more interested in
producing cigars with a sharp, spicy taste, like the
cigars his father made in Havana before the Revolution.
The final factor that contributes to taste is proper
construction. Beyond every other element of taste, even
with the finest blend in the world, a poorly constructed
cigar will be less enjoyable than a perfectly made cigar
of only modest blend. There are many reasons why faulty
construction destroys taste. First, according to Kelner,
is the negative effect of a faulty draw. Kelner says
that a loose draw (a cigar that burns fast, letting a
lot of smoke pass through quickly because it is
underfilled) will increase smoking temperature and
destroy taste. He adds that a tight smoke "reduces the
sensitivity of the taste buds," and on a fundamental
basis, drawing less smoke means having less to taste.
Of course, even if a cigar draws evenly, a roller has to
be sure to add the right amount of each tobacco in a
blend to each cigar. "If he is off by a gram," says
Carrillo, "it will change the taste of the cigar."
Even after making an honest effort to quantify taste,
the men quoted here don't want cigar making to turn into
a scientific process. Kelner instills great tobacco with
more power than is logical: "A beautiful cigar touches
all of my senses," and Carrillo says that when he is
smoking a great cigar, "I don't ever want to put it
down." Fuente, somewhat more philosophical than his two
peers, praises a fine cigar for the solitude it brings:
"You exhale and let the smoke out, and there is great
peace in the silence." These men know that the cigars
they produce become far more than the sum of their
parts.
However, certain analytical observations can be made
about cigars that these leaf mavens will own up to: A
good cigar can be differentiated from a bad one by
observing the leaf, the color of the ash and the burn
rate-and by tasting the smoke for complexity and
richness. By doing these things, you will understand the
quality of your cigar. This does not mean you must stop
romancing the stogie; you'll simply know your cigar
better. And being more knowledgeable about what you love
is, perhaps, the best definition of taste. |
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