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Vintage Cigars - Aged Cubans

If your idea of an aged Cuban is an ancient fisherman with skin like leather and a supporting role in a Hemingway plot alongside a fish, then listen up - we have news for you. Aged Cubans worldwide are being hunted down, set alight to and left to burn to within an inch of their lives. And when you consider that the cost of a single aged Cuban might be $400 or more a sane person might want to question the wisdom of putting a flame to these helpless ancients only to watch them disappear into smoke and very expensive carbonized ash. So, in case you are still not with it and you would like to at least have some idea of what we are talking about, welcome to the slightly insane world of vintage Havana cigars and their dedicated band of followers...

In the good old days - and in the cigar trade such golden days did exist - it was normal practice for cigar merchants to store cigars for anything up to 10 years or more before making them available for sale to the general public. The idea was and still is that cigars left to their own devices in the right conditions of temperature and humidity evolve over time to a condition different to that in which they started. Whether that condition is better or worse than they started off with is debateable but what is clear is that amongst serious cigar lovers there are plenty of people who appreciate the mature Cuban - so much so that in certain parts of the world, Hong Kong for example, it is still normal practice to smoke only aged Cuban cigars of 5 years or more - some even count the age of their cigar in decades!

A similar process takes place in the great wines of the world though possibly with one crucial difference. Not all wines age well whereas there is probably no Cuban cigar on the market that does not benefit from some ageing. Many ordinary wines for example can easily lose their "body" if left in the bottle for too long unopened. Such wines never had the inbuilt potential for ageing.

For further reading try these two short introductory articles that can be found here and here.