Gary,
Great topic, sir! Now this is the type of quality question -> discussion I love to see here on CP. Well done, mate! :thumbs:
I voted "boxing date." I voted this way because this is the moment in time where the cigars come finally and forever together into the unit (the box or cab) in which I will purchase it.
Spoken as a consumer, and that is how the manufacturers think we think (and how they've trained us to think), so this is how they market their cigars to us. I would pick all three. When a manufacturer starts the process of designing a new cigar, what would be the starting point? We'll get to that.
As such, it is the endpoint encapsulating the totality of all the variations in time frames from seedling on up.
That's assuming this batch treated the same as the last box of the same cigars you bought. Were all the time frames the same during it's construction process? I understand what you're saying, but due to market demand, was this cigar rushed to market to meet the demand? If you knew crop year and roll date, you could be assured it wasn't.
Would it be of interest to know all the other component dates? Sure, but only for the purposes of understanding the process of production from an academic standpoint.
But what about taking into consideration the conditions during the growing season, that year, doesn't that effect how a leaf eventually will taste?...drought, too much rain, unseasonably hot/humid/cool/sunny/cloudy....etc. We have read time and again about a cigar owner raving about a certain year's crop. It would be a logical assumption to say the final product would taste better than other years production of the exact same cigar due to a favorable growing season.
I think about it this way, working backward from the boxing date:
1. cigars in the box are sorted by color
2. the cigars available for sorting come from a larger population out of escaparate (in-factory aging and settling)
3. cigars from escaparate come from various rollers on various days from various bales of tobacco
4. tobacco in bales comes from various fermentation pylons of tobacco
5. tobacco from the fermentation pylons come from various curing barns
6. tobacco in the curing barns comes from various parts of a vega or various vegas
Take your thought process here and wind it back to a cigar's inception...but I won't go in reverse, I'll go forward. But first, let's bring a few things to light. Let's go with a popular trend in Nicaraguan puros...they have a specific taste profile due to soil, weather conditions, and the lineage of their tobacco plantings. Different than the Dominican puros that Zino Davidoff pioneered after he left the Cuban market 100%. What I mean is he invested seriously in a new country's geographic location and horticultural advantages to try and rival the industry standard, Cuban Cigars. In my mind, Padron did that with Nicaragua in the same serious manner. Now we take a guy like Pete Johnson, he wants to create a certain flavor cigar to rival a CC....
1) Pete consults a few trusted Industry experts and lays out his plan to build a certain type of cigar
2) They tell him that to accomplish this dream, Nicaragua is the place to do this, taste wise, not the DR
3) Pete goes down to Nicaragua and goes from farm to farm sampling tobacco to accomplish his goal
4) He finds all of his different tobaccos and starts the blending process....trial & error
My point being, it starts with the specific tobacco and crop...and how they are treated time wise. There was a time when cigars were rolled and put in cedar forms and stored for periods of a year or more. Given that, a cigar rolled with 3yo tobacco, form aged for a year and then boxed...it's 4yo at that point. Now I understand your logic about the maturation and melding process of all the different leaves involved within that cigar to achieve it's final taste profile, but with more information about it's past, I'm less likely to buy a box of cigars that I won't like if I choose to smoke them NOW...and God Knows how many duds we have bought over the years due to inconsistencies in bringing them to market. Plus, if we knew a certain crop year sucked, we wouldn't buy it :laugh:
So there is a pretty significant shuffling of materials from one bale/pylon/escaparate lot to another.
Is there?...or is there a stricter selection and separation process at play to start the prediction process of the final taste profile with better brands. How can consistency remain constant while tobacco is "shuffled?" How do the top brands remain consistent year after year, crop after crop, box after box? There must a certain amount of consistency within this "chaos theory" of shuffling in different materials from all over the place. You have a point there Mr. Wong.
And this doesn't even take into consideration the fact that the various components of a cigar (wrapper, filler, binder) might come from different materials streams.
But what of that separation process that takes place before the curing procedures in anticipation of it's eventual taste and burn characteristics? Decisions on where a leaf is finally used doesn't usually come until after this time.
As a practical matter, if I know that in the most general sense, it takes two years to go from field to rollable tobacco and 4 months from rollable tobacco to box, then I know about all that I can make use of. For example, a late 2007 box date means 2005-ish crop. I really would not want to have to keep track of any more information than this.
This is the Manufacturers marketing to us, if we go by your time frame...and we KNOW that a good cigars should be aged 3-4-5-6-or more years, we are now complacent to buy our cigars and tuck them away for an extended period of time before smoking them. But what if we knew that a certain tobacco was aged for 8years, 5years, or 3years...we now can assume they are ready to smoke now...IS there a "standard' time frame such as what you suggest everywhere or just in Cuba? I wish I knew the answer to that question. I was always told and taught that different varieties of leaves were aged/cured differently as they were monitored for looks, feel, and taste....and that always remained flexible until someone pulled the plug to say "it's ready". Wilkey, I wish I knew that too!
Selecting of tobaccos and blending for marca (brand)/vitola (frontmark) consistency is something that I expect as a given from the maker. I'd be curious to know how they do it, but in terms of selection of superior boxes, that information is of no practical value.
If we look at a person that would be considered a 'Master Blender', what factors into their blending technique? Do they know from experience that a certain seed of tobacco leaf, grown in a certain region under generally consistent conditions and cured a certain length of time and by a specific technique, will yield a specific taste? Now, is it through their years of experience that they know that blending multiple types of these leaves together will yield a certain taste profile? Or do they roll different leaves of tobacco, with a general knowledge of each, into recorded blends and then smoke them young, pull out familiar taste traits and predict what they will taste like with a few years of age on them?
Every roller I have spoken with always said they wanted to know the specific type of leaf and crop year before they would raise a finger to create a single cigar. I need to speak to more experts with varying opinions on this subject and chew their ears off with these questions.
Like I have stated before on the CP forums...when I buy a box of CC and age them over many years and they still don't wake up, where do I go to get my money back? Take your recent cigar porn you posted, you bought a 6yo box of cigars KNOWING that they were a proven winner. Could you guarantee the same from a 2008 box 6 years from now? Maybe, just maybe, if we knew more about a cigars past (before they are boxed) we could make a better buying decision.
Wilkey
