Why I am a Cigar Novice but a Wine Snob
A reflection on how to enjoy the finer luxuries of life in two polar opposite ways.
It has been proclaimed - perhaps in private rooms coupled with a nod and a wink - that Cuban cigars were actually rolled on the thighs of a virgin. While this urban legend might delight the wishful thinking among us, it is not true. Then again, how would I really know? What do I know about cigars? That is the question before us, at least before me.
If you tot up all of the cigars I’ve smoked in my life probably amounts to the number of laptops you’ve had in your life - not very many, but some. I am a complete cigar novice.
My dilettante disposition aside, I am rather loving the whole business. It is quite odd given how much I love being a self-confessed wine snob. Anyone who learns to enjoy wine properly cannot but help drown himself in all of the trappings of pretentiousness the wine world procures for us.
The complex and medieval matter of terroir and the idea of talking endlessly in complicated metaphors that you know deep down are nonsense are completely joyous things winer-lovers confess to dreaming about after just one drop of the stuff.
It seems I don’t dream of cigars in the same way. I don’t know enough about them or the cigar world for that matter. One might argue that it’s merely a matter of time; that I shall one day be as snooty and obsessed with cigars as I like to think I am about wine. Perhaps so.
However, I think those worlds themselves - despite overlapping in their nature - are a little different in their consumption. The average consumer of wine prefers red, white, or rosé and knows they will taste broadly similar, at least relative to each other. For example, an amateur wine enthusiast does not have the sophisticated pallet to discern any notes in the individual wine itself, but he can tell the difference quite clearly between the warmer spicier flavours of a Pinot Noir compared to the colder, sharper, more citrusy flavours of a Chardonnay.
A proper ash tray - rather basin - brought out for me in Prague
With cigars, I would argue there are no such big classifications of taste for the mass consumer. Ring gauges (how the thickness of a cigar is measured) are permanently incremental. You can light something so skinny it will be the most anorexic cigar you will have ever tried or light something with such girth so as to look like a Joke Shop model in the window.
The length of a cigar is often chosen by how long you would like to smoke it, whereas wines are all in the same size bottle offering the same liquid oz regardless of colour and flavour. A 175ml per serving (dreadfully inadequate for effect) is a 175ml serving regardless of the bottle and its contents.
There are many parallels between these two worlds, it should be said. Nick Foulkes remarked that his move from the world of wine to cigar world was one of ‘natural evolution’, and I quite agree with him. That is not to say however that I too shall be moving away from wine onto cigars, or obtaining the beauty of the cigar world in my cultural interests as much as I have tried with wine. Though if you offered me a glass of wine and a cigar right now, I’m unlikely to say no.
For the cigar connoisseur among you, please do not think that I am writing off the great culture that surrounds cigars. On the contrary, I wish I could relish it. Maybe one day I will. For now, I do not even pretend to know what I am talking about, because I don’t. I am just traipsing my way through the screen of smoke to learn what it is I truly like.
La Casa del Habano, Krakow
