From seed to smoke…
Five years ago, the cigar you're smoking was nothing more than tiny little seeds.
You're about to put flame to the foot of a handmade cigar, and for the next hour you plan on enjoying its rich, sublime smoke. Carefully made by hand, exclusively from tobacco. As you puff, consider the time involved in this $5, $10 or maybe $15 piece of luxury you're enjoying. The best handmade cigars from seed to smoke, is the result of a journey that takes several years.
Cigar tobacco begins as a tiny seed the size of a candy sprinkle. So small that they need to be pelletized, coated with an inert substance such as clay for easier handling. (The coating melts away when watered.) Many tobacco growers get their seeds by selecting their heartiest plants and harvesting the seeds from the flower that grows at the top of the plant.
The size of the seed makes them quite easy to smuggle (use your imagination) one reason why Cuban seed has made innumerable trips from the island to such places as Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Some companies keep their seed locked in safes and grow sterile plants to ensure that competitors can't steal the product.
The seeds are planted and in about 60 days will turn into a seedling a few inches tall that's ready to plant. The crudest form of seedling plot is planted directly in the ground. When it's time to move to the field proper, the tiny plant is dug up and then replanted, a traumatic process that results in great mortality of seedlings. Raised beds provide better results, and planting in trays makes it better still, for the root balls slip effortlessly from the trays and are ready to go into the ground.
At that stage, cigar tobacco grows at a furious pace. It takes about two months for a seedling to grow into a mature plant, depending on the type of plant. Once harvested, it spends another 40 to 60 or so days in a curing barn. After that, it's time to ferment, and then to age.
But farmers can't go by a calendar for their harvest. Like wine grapes weather, seed variety and other variables can affect the crop, and harvest times have to be adjusted.
The parallels to wine continue: some fields in the Dominican Republic and in hilly plots of Ecuador are planted by hand, while many farms are planted with the use of a tractor.
The plants typically are fertilized with a granular fertilizer and the fields are hoed by hand. At about the one-month stage—halfway through the growing process—Connecticut-shade plants are still short (shin height) and tied to a support where some of the suckers that impede the growth are removed. A piece of string is tied to the plant above it to help it grow straight. Then they remove, by hand, the lowest group of leaves on the plant, as well as any suckers (the excess vegetation that grows above the tobacco leaves). After the leaves are culled, the field is hoed to push the soil above the nodes created by the removal of the leaves. For every node that is covered with soil roots will grow, making a stronger plant.
In the second month of life, the plant grows at full speed. Brutal, sultry Connecticut summer nights may be hell on sleepers, but they're heaven to a tobacco farmer, with as much as two inches of growth occurring on a hot, humid night.
About four months from its start as a tobacco seed, give or take a few weeks depending upon the weather, the tobacco plants are fully grown and the leaves mature. If it's a broadleaf plant, that means it stands waist-high after the long, tall flower has been removed. Cuban seed is about six feet tall. Connecticut shade or Ecuador Connecticut can reach heights of over nine feet.
Now it's time to prime, or to reap. Cuban and Connecticut-seed tobacco plants are harvested in primings (similar to tries in wine harvesting), in which a worker removes three leaves at a time from a plant, working from the bottom up. The harvest is spaced out over several days. As tobacco matures from the bottom of the plant upward, it allows the leaves to be picked at the pinnacle of ripening, which optimizes labor usage—if every leaf needed to be picked at the same time, a farmer would need a thousand workers on one day and none the next.
Primed leaves are put onto lathes, or cujes, and hung in the barns. Shade farmers in Connecticut use sewing machines to attach the leaves to the lathes, but in most of the world the leaves are sewn or tied by hand. San Andres Negro and Connecticut broadleaf are stalk-cut. The entire plant is hacked with an axe, allowed to wilt in the sun (think appassimento) then speared on a lathe. Whether it's primed or cut, the tobacco next goes to the same place: a curing barn, where it will spend upwards of a month drying and turn from a verdant green into a rich brown.
Cured cigar tobacco looks inviting, but it's hardly ready to smoke. It's full of ammonia and other impurities that would make even the most die-hard smokers woozy in the head if they were to smoke such leaf. To remove the impurities and to develop the hidden richness of the leaf, cigar tobacco needs fermentation.
Fermenting tobacco—or working it, as they say—takes one part artistry and one part science. Workers take cured tobacco leaves and lay them on a platform, building waist-high piles known as pilons, or bulks, that can contain thousands of leaves. The leaves contain water, and the pressure of the pile—which can weigh up to 5,000 pounds—creates heat, which transforms the properties of the leaf. Walking into a room where fresh tobacco is being fermented is an eye-stinging experience, due to the ammonia coming off the bulks.
Fermentation can be quick or lengthy (as it can be with wine production), depending on the type of leaf being worked. Thin, mild leaves such as Connecticut shade go through the process in a few months. Thick, brutish leaves such as broadleaf require a beating to work into shape, some as long as five years.
No tobacco can be fermented continuously for five years, not even broadleaf, but it can be aged for that long, and much longer. Aging, which follows fermentation, occurs with much lower levels of humidity and in smaller packages, minimizing the heat created from the combination of moisture and pressure.
After fermentation (or between rounds), tobacco is packed into bales of cardboard or wood that weigh around 200 pounds apiece. It's fairly dry when put into the bale, once tobacco is dry it doesn't ferment anymore.
Inside the bale, the tobacco will age, slowly maturing to further round out the flavors that have been mellowed by fermentation.
Great cigarmakers such as Padrón, Fuente, Davidoff and others have warehouses stacked full of tobacco bales. The stocks are essential. A Dominican Montecristo is expected to taste the same today as it did one, two and three years ago. Cigarmakers are blenders, much like the makers of nonvintage Champagne or blended whisky, and most cigars are expected to maintain a consistency of flavor.
Because cigar tobacco is an agricultural product, it's subject to the whims of nature. As a result of differing weather conditions, two plants of the same seed type planted on the same spot of land and treated identically might taste noticeably different year to year. More rain might make the tobacco thinner, while more wind might stress the plant and make it stronger. To combat the changes, a cigarmaker needs large stocks of leaf to blend out the differences.
Once the blend has been selected, it takes no time at all to turn it from leaf to cigar. A buncher rolls one leaf of binder (sometimes two with smaller leaves, particularly in Cuba) around a group of filler leaves, then places the bunch in a mold, where it sits for several hours, being turned several times to avoid having a seam along the side. Once it is firm, its shape secure, the bunch is given to a roller. (In some cigar factories, one person does both rolling and bunching.) The roller wraps one wrapper leaf around the cigar, taking perhaps a minute or so to do the work.
A cigar roller can make 500 cigars in a day if allowed to work at his fastest pace, but typically a cigar factory manager will limit his workers to far fewer. One hundred fifty is more typical.
The years have taken the tobacco from seed to finished leaf, ready to be rolled, but there's more to the journey before a cigar becomes a brand. Bigger companies make dozens of brands (cuvees) and new creations are a vital part of the business.
As you prepare to light your next stick, pause for a moment before you turn that cigar to ash. Because from seed to box, it's been on a journey that may have lasted five or more years. Take your time enjoying the smoke.
