CigarFox

How Do Cigars Get Rated?

The cigar ratings supplied by publications like Cigar Magazine and Cigar Aficionado form an important part of the modern cigar industry. For cigar smokers, these ratings provide guidance in a crowded market.

As pressed-for-time moviegoers may look to Roger Ebert for guidance at the multiplex, smokers use the magazines’ ratings to cut down on their in-store browsing time. For cigar makers, meanwhile, the ratings can be the touch of life – or the kiss of death. When Cigar Aficionado gave a high rating to a Fuente Spanish Lonsdale cigar, the magazine’s imprimatur helped to cause a run on the brand, rendering it scarce and highly sought-after and increasing the profile of Fuente’s cigars in general. Every cigar maker covets a 90-or-higher rating from these influential judges.

But where do these numbers actually come from? For staffers at Cigar Aficionado, the reviewing process starts at the store. While music and book reviewers are often given free “review copies” of CDs or books (a practice that makes things convenient for the reviewer, but also diminishes his or her independence), Cigar Aficionado tries to buy cigars at close to retail prices.

This leads to big cigar bills for the magazine – but it also means the cigars they review are as much like the ones you buy at the store as is possible. (Unlike CDs or books, of course, every cigar is slightly different in composition and taste.) Sometimes, if a cigar is hard to find in stores, the magazine will request “review cigars”; ditto for cases when the magazine is trying to preview a cigar before it hits stores.

The members of the panel – all of them longstanding magazine staffers – are told nothing about the identity, price range, source, or country of origin of the cigar. A “tasting coordinator” – not a member of the panel – removes the cigar’s band so that it cannot be identified by the panel’s members.

The blank, anonymous cigar is then assigned a number so that its identity can be retrieved after it’s rated.

The members of the tasting panel then retire, separately, to their offices to smoke the cigars without consulting each other. Each member of the panel assigns the cigar a certain number of points, based on its performance in any of four categories.

First of all, cigars are rated by APPEARANCE and CONSTRUCTION. Is the cigar visually pleasing? Is the wrapper smooth, or wadded-looking? Is it moist to the touch or dry? Does it stay firm? Is it veiny or soggy? After all, a great-tasting cigar that wilts the minute you take it out of the box, or looks too unappetizing to be placed in someone’s mouth, does smokers no good.

Cigars can win up to 15 points in this category for being well-made and attractive.

Secondly, of course, the cigar is rated on its FLAVOR – a category that carries with it 25 of the possible 100 points. Who needs a good-looking but brackish cigar? Cigars should not taste bitter or leave a nasty aftertaste. Both taste and aftertaste should be smooth but full, complicated, and rich.

A maximum of 25 points can be won for various qualities ranged together under the general heading of SMOKING CHARACTERISTICS. How does it burn? Is it hard to light? Does it burn one-sidedly? Will the smoke burn your mouth, or feel cool and comfortable as it should? How hard do you have to pull to get a mouthful? All these questions and more are considered.

Finally, the tasters each give a score (up to 35 points) for OVERALL IMPRESSION. (Flavor counts most here.) Is the cigar good, bad – or great? And the question utmost in any dedicated smoker’s mind – is it worth the money? The panel’s various scores in each category are averaged and a final score is the result.

Ratings, of course, are always subjective, depending on individuals’ taste – even if those individuals have well-developed, highly educated tastes. Your mileage may vary. For any smoker, the ultimate authority should always be your own tastebuds!

Cigar Fox provides the finest cigars that include brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Gurkha, Macanudo, Rocky Patel, Romeo, Drew Estate, and many more. Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters. For more information, please visit www.cigarfox.com.

It’s A Small World: Tobaccos From Around The Globe

Most nonsmokers think of tobacco plants as interchangeable – if you’ve smoked one, you’ve smoked ‘em all. But as anyone knows who has ever compared the taste of a premium cigar to a cheap one – or who has visited the Middle East, where an undreamt-of range of sweetly intense tobacco smells assault the tourist’s nostril – nothing could be further from the truth. Tobacco plants vary as widely – and as consequentially – as any other plant. Here is a rough guide to a few of these differences – and the difference they make to smokers.

Going alphabetically, we begin with Aromatic Fire-Cured tobacco, grown in the western portions of Tennessee and Kentucky as well as in Virginia. Rich and slightly flowery, you’ll find it used in snuff, cigarettes and as the less dominant partner in blends made for pipe smokers. On the other side of the world, there’s a variant, another kind of fire-cured tobacco: strong-flavored Latakia, grown in Cyprus and Syria for use in Balkan and English pipe tobacco blends.

Then there’s Brightleaf tobacco, which originated in North Carolina and, hence, is nicknamed “Virginia tobacco.” (Well, whatever.) Developed in 1839, in response to smokers’ demands for a milder tobacco than the dark fire-cured leaves commonly grown in the antebellum South, this tobacco owes its existence to a combination of industry and happenstance.

Farmers in nearby Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as farther-away Ohio, had been trying since the early part of the century to develop a lighter leaf, trying different ways of curing the plants. Abisha Slade of North Carolina, noticing that sandy soil tended to yield weaker plants, tried the expedient of planting a gold-leaf plant in a field of seemingly-infertile sandy soil belonging to him. A clever idea, but all might still have been lost had Slade’s slave, Stephen, not used charcoal to restart a curing fire that had gone out. The sudden heat turned the leaves yellow. Slade, noticing this, seized on it and made of it a method: grow plants in poor soils and then heat-cure them with charcoal (rather than fire-curing them with, well, fire).

In any case, Slade’s discovery – or Stephen’s discovery – had immediate economic implications. Not only did American smokers now have the less acrid tobacco they’d been looking for, but Virginia farmers had something for which they’d hardly dared hope – an economic use for the previously infertile Appalachian piedmont.

Farmers stuck with otherwise-useless lands suddenly had a cash crop – and the Piedmont counties came to dominate US tobacco production. The Civil War only increased the popularity of Brightleaf tobacco, as Confederate soldiers passing through the railway hub of Danville, VA, acquired a taste for the popular local variety, and brought that taste with the to the front.

Trading it among each other – and, during breaks in battle, with Union soldiers – these young men served as Brightleaf’s unappointed press agents. The Civil War created a national market for the crop and ensured that Virginia’s Caswell and Pittsylvania Counties were the only counties in the South to find themselves richer after the war than before it.

White Burley tobacco, meanwhile, furnishes a true example of evolution in action. At the tail-end of the Civil War, an Ohio farmer, George Webb, finds that a few of his seedlings look sick and whitish; in the field, they grow to normal size but remain light-colored. He put them on sale at a Cincinnati market – not as a smokable tobacco but as a novelty plant. But by the following year he’d already decided that the air-cured, mild-tasting leaf was worth a risk, and planted ten acres of seedlings from that first generation of mild white plant. With time, the new variety – White Burley, produced seemingly by chance genetic mutation and encouraged in its development by cultivation – became the primary ingredient in chewing tobacco as well as in American pipe and cigarette tobacco. Meanwhile, Red Burley, popular in the mid-nineteenth century, sank into obscurity and eventual extinction; nowadays White Burley is generally just Burley.

Cigar Fox provides the finest cigars that include brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Gurkha, Macanudo, Rocky Patel, Romeo, Drew Estate, and many more. Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters. For more information, please visit www.cigarfox.com.

MLB notes: Phillies will go with Blanton in Game 4 – The Sun News
PHILADELPHIA — Joe Blanton was picked to start Game 4 of the World Series for the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies. Manager Charlie Manuel said Friday he will go with Blanton against the New York Yankees rather than ace Cliff Lee on short
Source: www.thesunnews.com

When Thompson Started Out, the Brooklyn Machine Offered a Way Up – New York Times
Howard Golden knew that power, having ruled as party chieftain and borough president. Now 83 and retired, he sits in a Court Street office and talks about himself and his former protégé, William C. Thompson Jr. “The reform types stared at me like
Source: www.nytimes.com

THE RIVER COWBOYS: Since 1900, an Old West way to move cattle across – Portage Daily Register
Stepping onto the wooden ferry afloat in the Fox River, it’s easy to envision what the river cowboys went through a century ago. The only thing missing from the scene is Clint Eastwood puffing on a short cigar, sitting high atop a horse. The open
Source: portagedailyregister.com

Great Moments In Cigar History: The Nineteenth Century

Some businesses are more romantic than others.

For example, compare winemaking with toothpick-making. Now, the wine business is, on a day-by-day basis, anything but one ecstatic Cabernet Sauvignon after another. You have to handle distribution, advertising, labor, storage – one prosaic detail after another. And the toothpick isn’t nearly as boring as it looks – science journalist Henry Petroski has devoted, in fact, an entire book to it, The Toothpick, which, critics say, makes unexpectedly fascinating reading. The toothpick even has its own little place in literary history – it’s the business by which Chad Newsome, hero of Henry James’s great novel The Ambassadors, is said to have earned his living.

Still – would you rather get seated at a party next to a wine guy, or a toothpick guy?

Most of us would feel the same way about the cigar business – that it’s somehow more exciting than most other industries, including that of the workaday, assembly-line-made cigarette. In this case, perhaps history bears out our intuitions. Take a look at some of the great moments in the history of cigars, all taken from one tumultuous century – the nineteenth.

1810: The branding of cigars begins in – where else? – Cuba, where the first two applications to register a cigar brand are recorded: B. Rencurrel and Hija de Cabanas y Carbajal. Also, cigar workshops appear for the first time in the newly-minted United States.

1817: Spain ends its monopoly over the tobacco grown in its former colony, Cuba, when King Ferdinand VII signs a bill allowing for private growing and selling of tobacco, as well as cigar production and sales.

1800s-1820s: Cigar manufacture spreads north from Spain to France, Germany, and (later) England.

1836: Cuba’s cigar export market reaches 4.887 million units and 306 factories, thanks in part to the lifting of the Spanish monopoly nineteen years earlier.

1837: Remember cigar boxes – those nostalgic, brightly-illustrated items that signify the higher standards of an earlier era in the history of product packaging? Well, that tradition begins in this year, when Ramon Allones creates his same-named cigar. His company is the first to use intricate lithography to set boxes of his cigars apart from other brands.

1840: Tobacco grows in popularity, and cigar export from Cuba alone surpasses 141.6 million.

1844: H. Upmann, one of the most famous of all cigar brands, is introduced in Cuba. How’s that spelled? No one is really sure – the brand may have been inaugurated by Hermann Upmann, a German banker, or by his family, who (to confuse matters further) may have been named Hupmann.

1845: Debut of Partagas and La Corona cigars, both in Havana.

1850s: Tobacco’s popularity scales new heights when, during the Crimean War (1853-1856), Turkish tobacco – the lusty, semi-sweet, full-flavored tobacco that makes Middle Eastern travel such a joy for the nonallergic – achieves general availability in Europe for the first time. Smoking rooms, smoking jackets, even smoking caps and slippers become part of every Victorian gentleman’s home, and fashion plate Prince Edward, despite his mother Queen Victoria’s well-known hatred of smoking, promotes smoking by his own well-remarked example. In 1855, the decade’s halfway point, Cuba exports 356.6 million cigars – a record yet to be equaled.

1861: Birth of Swisher Cigars when Ohio businessman Daniel Swisher, collecting a debt, is paid in the form of a small cigar business.

1861-1865: United States Civil War leads to further popularity of cigar smoking, as young men away from home (and under great stress) take up the habit.

1865: To many contemporary Americans, the word “lector” makes us think of Hannibal. But for cigar workers in Spanish-speaking countries, it has altogether more pleasant associations, because in this year, the practice of hiring people to read to cigar rollers (“readers,” or, in Spanish, “lectors”) is inaugurated in Cuba (where else?), at the El Figaro factory. This practice is so popular that, in 1868 and again in 1895, it is banned by the Cuban government for a period (ten years the first time, three the second). Apparently those cigar workers were getting too knowledgeable for (their rulers’) comfort. Maybe we could bring this custom to other industries?

1873: Romeo y Julieta cigars introduced by Inocencio Alvarez and Mannin Garcia.

1886: Ybor City neighborhood in Tampa, Florida, a regional center of cigar production, is founded by Vincent Ybor.

1898: Rudyard Kipling writes the line “A woman is a just a women, but a good cigar is a smoke,” linking misogyny and cigar-smoking in the minds of thousands of Edwardian gentlemen. Generations of female smokers and, later, female cigar execs will beg to differ.

About Cigar Fox Cigar Fox provides the finest cigars that include brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Gurkha, Macanudo, Rocky Patel, Romeo, Drew Estate, and many more. Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters. For more information, please visit www.cigarfox.com.

SAN JUAN, TEXAS (AP) — A man arrested on felony weapons charges in San Juan where ritualistic bones and blood were found faces a detention hearing next week. Ruben Ambrosio Fonseca Jr. had his initial appearance Thursday in federal court. A continue

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A former tobacco industry executive said Friday in Charleston that cigarette companies have targeted black people in America. LaTanisha Wright began working for the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., based in Louisville, Ky., in continue

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) – Tobacco advocates are seething over a new Canadian law they claim will snuff out sales of cigarettes packed with U.S. burley, and they are fighting back to protect their export sales. They are asking U.S. trade officials to continue

NFL Picks, Week 8: The Twittering of the damned — and also of Mike – Nationalpost.com
(Photo: Kansas City’s Larry Johnson found out the perils of using Twitter the hard way. Doug Benc/Getty Images) Clearly, Twitter and the National Football League are not meant for each other. Sure, Cincinnati’s Chad Ochocinco is a Twitter star
Source: network.nationalpost.com

Blanton to start World Series Game 4 for Phillies – Fresno Bee
Philadelphia Phillies manager Charlie Manuel has tabbed Joe Blanton to start Game 4 of the World Series, opting against putting Cliff Lee in after only three days’ rest. Manuel chose Blanton to pitch because of his experience last year, when he
Source: www.fresnobee.com

Philippines Angeles City Upgrades Nightlife and Entertainment Amenities Yats … – PR-USA.net (press release)

Philippines Angeles City Upgrades Nightlife and Entertainment Amenities Yats … PR-USA.net (press release) Fans of Cuban cigars had it bad for a long time living in the Philippines where selection is pitifully small and painfully expensive. … and more »

Source: news.google.com

The Chairman Loves You: Merryvale Merlot 2005 – Philadelphia Citypaper
Merryvale is a big-ish Napa Valley winery deservedly famous for its Cabernet Sauvignon, especially bottlings from the Starmont vineyard. I’d never had a Merlot of theirs, and picked the 2005 vintage up based on its high rating (90 out of 100) and
Source: citypaper.net

When The Music’s Over (turn out the lights) – Salon
Graduation Day, roll it over in your mind for a moment. The “culmination” of this journey into the madness of military service. Twelve weeks of brainwashing and indoctrination and psychological conditioning. All done up in what amounts to a parade
Source: open.salon.com

What does a Playmate wear for Halloween? – Weblogs.sun-sentinel.com
When did Halloween become so inextricably tied to sex? How did we go from Mary Tyler Moore quickening the pulse with a mildly clingy witch costume to the Shore Club overrun by Playboy Playmates, Penthouse Pets at Pangaea, the Porn Star Ball at Opium
Source: weblogs.sun-sentinel.com

John O’Quinn, 68, a flamboyant lawyer who won billions in cases against makers of breast implants, pharmaceuticals, and tobacco products, died yesterday in a Houston traffic accident. Mr. O’Quinn and his personal assistant, Johnny Cutliff, were continue

HOUSTON (KTRK) — One of Houston’s most prominent attorneys, John O’Quinn, has died after he and another man crashed into a tree Thursday morning. [ PHOTOS : John O'Quinn through the years ] The accident happened on Allen Parkway just west of continue

You can call it what you want — smokeless tobacco, spit tobacco, snus, chew, snuff, pinch, plug or dip — but don’t call it harmless. If you’re considering making the switch from cigarettes to chewing tobacco because you think the smokeless continue

McAllen — Police in the rural south Texas town of San Juan await test results on bones found in a backyard shed. Preliminary investigation suggests at least some were human and purchased on the Internet for ceremonial purposes. Gonzalez says police continue

How Do Cigars Get Rated?

The cigar ratings supplied by publications like Cigar Magazine and Cigar Aficionado form an important part of the modern cigar industry. For cigar smokers, these ratings provide guidance in a crowded market.

As pressed-for-time moviegoers may look to Roger Ebert for guidance at the multiplex, smokers use the magazines’ ratings to cut down on their in-store browsing time. For cigar makers, meanwhile, the ratings can be the touch of life – or the kiss of death. When Cigar Aficionado gave a high rating to a Fuente Spanish Lonsdale cigar, the magazine’s imprimatur helped to cause a run on the brand, rendering it scarce and highly sought-after and increasing the profile of Fuente’s cigars in general. Every cigar maker covets a 90-or-higher rating from these influential judges.

But where do these numbers actually come from? For staffers at Cigar Aficionado, the reviewing process starts at the store. While music and book reviewers are often given free “review copies” of CDs or books (a practice that makes things convenient for the reviewer, but also diminishes his or her independence), Cigar Aficionado tries to buy cigars at close to retail prices.

This leads to big cigar bills for the magazine – but it also means the cigars they review are as much like the ones you buy at the store as is possible. (Unlike CDs or books, of course, every cigar is slightly different in composition and taste.) Sometimes, if a cigar is hard to find in stores, the magazine will request “review cigars”; ditto for cases when the magazine is trying to preview a cigar before it hits stores.

The members of the panel – all of them longstanding magazine staffers – are told nothing about the identity, price range, source, or country of origin of the cigar. A “tasting coordinator” – not a member of the panel – removes the cigar’s band so that it cannot be identified by the panel’s members.

The blank, anonymous cigar is then assigned a number so that its identity can be retrieved after it’s rated.

The members of the tasting panel then retire, separately, to their offices to smoke the cigars without consulting each other. Each member of the panel assigns the cigar a certain number of points, based on its performance in any of four categories.

First of all, cigars are rated by APPEARANCE and CONSTRUCTION. Is the cigar visually pleasing? Is the wrapper smooth, or wadded-looking? Is it moist to the touch or dry? Does it stay firm? Is it veiny or soggy? After all, a great-tasting cigar that wilts the minute you take it out of the box, or looks too unappetizing to be placed in someone’s mouth, does smokers no good.

Cigars can win up to 15 points in this category for being well-made and attractive.

Secondly, of course, the cigar is rated on its FLAVOR – a category that carries with it 25 of the possible 100 points. Who needs a good-looking but brackish cigar? Cigars should not taste bitter or leave a nasty aftertaste. Both taste and aftertaste should be smooth but full, complicated, and rich.

A maximum of 25 points can be won for various qualities ranged together under the general heading of SMOKING CHARACTERISTICS. How does it burn? Is it hard to light? Does it burn one-sidedly? Will the smoke burn your mouth, or feel cool and comfortable as it should? How hard do you have to pull to get a mouthful? All these questions and more are considered.

Finally, the tasters each give a score (up to 35 points) for OVERALL IMPRESSION. (Flavor counts most here.) Is the cigar good, bad – or great? And the question utmost in any dedicated smoker’s mind – is it worth the money? The panel’s various scores in each category are averaged and a final score is the result.

Ratings, of course, are always subjective, depending on individuals’ taste – even if those individuals have well-developed, highly educated tastes. Your mileage may vary. For any smoker, the ultimate authority should always be your own tastebuds!

Cigar Fox provides the finest cigars that include brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Gurkha, Macanudo, Rocky Patel, Romeo, Drew Estate, and many more. Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters. For more information, please visit www.cigarfox.com.