We had no idea what a revelation it would be: we didn’t know that a mouthful of smoke – slowly drawn into your mouth through the delicate folds of rolled tobacco leaves and then gently swirled over the taste areas of your tongue – could evoke flavours like honey, cashew nut and cherry… or citrus, cardamom and bread… or even moss and hay.
For the record: Both of us editors are ex-cigarette-smokers who kicked the habit more than a decade ago. The revelation didn’t occur at El Floridita in Havana, Cuba, where Ernest Hemingway used to hang out. And it wasn’t a Fidel Castro impersonator or a reincarnated Winston Churchill who introduced us to the finer points of smoking a cigar. Nor was it the legendary Graciela Gonzalez, aka Granny Puretta, who, in 2008, at the age of 84, agreed to pose with a cigar clamped between her teeth outside the dollars. We handed over the money. (Please excuse the closed eyes; we wanted to take another photo but she demanded another $5.)
