Or, smoking cigars is like sucking dick - it takes practice to get it right
I watch those TV shows about wine, occasionally. I watch them because I take a perverse pleasure in how much I hate the wine-babble of the people involved in them. I felt the same way about cigar aficionados - until tonight. Wine-speak I still despise, but no longer praises sung to the divine Cigar.
My wife, bless her black little heart and her chromed-steel eyes, likes to give - and not just on Christmas Day. All this month she's been presenting me with presents because for her Christmas covers the season, not just the day. She's one of those people, who in my experience are terribly rare, who actually finds greater pleasure in the giving of gifts than in the receiving of them. And she likes to stretch her pleasure out over the entire month.
Two nights ago, UPS brought me another of these presents, one she'd told me about. A selection box of five cigars. Five good cigars. And by 'good' I don't just mean expensive. Good in the sense that I've been impressed by the degree of pleasure I've experienced in smoking the two I've already consumed and the one I'm smoking now, as I type. This one I'm smoking now is the most impressive so far, a Ricco Patel. The first two were substantial and satisfying - but this is just dandy.
Apart from the outermost skin of leaves, which is very delicate and easily damaged, it's an extremely solid, densely packed and hard to light cigar - but once it is lit it burns very steadily and hotly. The ash is a thin skin over a live coal, not in the least fluffy or light.
For all the heat and density of the coal there is nothing overheated or coarse in the smoke itself, which is very pleasantly cool. The chemistry of a cigar is complex, involving over three thousand compounds, and the taste, the quality, of a cigar is a result of the combination of all of them in the specific proportions present. I've no idea what some cigar expert might find to taste in the one I'm smoking now, but what I experience is the kind of wood smoke you only find in an English Autumn (Fall, to you American heathens), and the taste of Black Treacle (which is nothing like molasses, though molasses is it's nearest American equivalent).
It's also giving me a significant nicotine buzz.
The one I smoked first was impressive, in part because it was, really, my first good cigar - and you never forget your first. The other two I've subsequently smoked have each been more impressive than the one that went before it. I hope that the two remaining continue the trend. This one has gone particularly well with a bottle of Jamaican Red Stripe lager, and a shot of Old Smuggler whiskey.
Why, if I ruled the world, would smoking good cigars be mandatory? Because if everyone took the time to smoke a serious cigar seriously, and to enjoy the simple physicality of its pleasures, they'd have an opportunity to realise the insignificance of everything else.
Cigars (and beer) are God's way of telling us that He loves us and wants us to be happy.
Thank you, Sabrina, for introducing me to one more Champagne-item that I'm going to force our Beer-budget to run to.