Featured Countries of Origin from your Favorite Cigar of the Month Club: NICARAGUA AND THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
As you know, your favorite Cigar of the Month Club includes basic information about the wrapper on each of our monthly selections. Our descriptions usually include the familiar Sumatra, Habano, Ecuadorian, CT Shade, Broadleaf, Cameroon labels, noting the area from which the wrapper leaves were grown and the type of tobacco. What we don’t have room for is some additional info you may find pretty interesting, such as:
• Wrapper leaves, though only 1 leaf thick, add flavor, feel and eye appeal.
• The more delicate wrapper leaves such as CT Shade, are very susceptible to sunburn, so are grown under protective tents.
• Pound for pound, CT Shade leaves are one of the world’s most expensive agricultural products.
• There have been years when entire crops of CT Shade tobacco have been lost to the “blue mold,” impacting the cigar industry greatly.
• Leaves at the top of all tobacco plants receive the most sun, so have the strongest flavor.
• Criollo is one of the original Cuban tobaccos that emerged around the time of Christopher Columbus.
• Some triple fermented tobaccos are aged a full twelve years.
• Corojo, a hybrid of Sumatran and native Cuban black tobaccos, dates to the 1940’s. Oily textured with thin, small veins, it is considered by many to be the pinnacle of all wrappers.
• Ligero leaves, rather thick and oily in nature, add strength to the wrap.
• Sungrown Connecticut Broadleaf leaves produce a coarse, dark, sweet wrapper.
• When Broadleaf is harvested, the entire plant (not just some leaves) is cut and hung in the curing barn.
• The Honduran tobacco industry began with Cuban seeds illegally smuggled into Honduras by J. Bermejo, considered the father of the tobacco industry there. And that, my friends, is a wrap!
