Cigar nostalgia

Yesterday, inter alia, saw a discussion about cigars, the question being could you do old cigars in the same way as some people do old wine.

The inconclusive discussion thought it had two facts. Fact 1 was that rich people bought up quantities of cigars, perhaps from the manufacturers, but bought them for store. They remained with the vendor, to be called down as and when, perhaps years and years later. Rich people like presidents of the USA who liked Cuban cigars, but who were not supposed to buy them. Fact 2 was a memory of an email from the people at reference 1 (not available at the time of the discussion as I did not think to crank up Cortana), a memory which suggested that they had been talking about aged cigars.

Why would cigars be any different from wine? Both are of primarily organic origin and involve life-sustaining water. Both can support life of some sort. Cigars will go mouldy if you let them get too moist. Would cheese be a better analog to cigars than wine? The food marketeers have certainly managed to associate the phrase 'very mature' with 'good' in the minds of the cheese buying public, in much the same way as the lager marketeers associated the word 'strong' with 'good'.

There was also the terroir. The tobacco from which the cigars were made would take its flavour & savour from the ground and climate in which it was grown. So one might get precious about that, but that was not the same as aging.

At which point the discussion melted into mild nostalgia for the days when one might take a comfortable cigar with one's afternoon beverage. Nostalgia tempered in my case by memories of all the cigars which went wrong for one reason or another. Not reliable in the way that cigarettes are.

This morning I wake to check the simply cigar site to find fact 2 at least confirmed. They do indeed talk of aged cigars, cigars which are perhaps twenty years old. They do talk of maturing cigars. But they do not seem to supply chapter and verse about aging gratis. For your leaflet about aging, you have to stump up maybe £500 for one's box of elderly Cohibas. You have to buy your pig in a poke - unless, that is, wikipedia has an article on the subject.

From which I associate to tea. Another crowd of people can get quite excited about that. And it is a leaf product with psychoactive ingredients, just like tobacco.

From where I drift off into a reverie about why plants evolved substances in their leaves which have strange effects on our brains, brains which presumably evolved a long time, millions if not billions of years, after they did. Which particular force of nature was at work here?

Reference 1: http://www.simplycigars.co.uk/.