Historically, people would go to the drugstore or tobacconist, plunk down fifty-cents, and get the finest cigar Havana produced. Was it aged? Only as long as the tobacconist kept it in stock. What did people do for storage? Maybe they had a humidor where they kept their stock. But these days, we buy 1 box to smoke, 5 to age, have walk-in humidors and specially dedicated cabinetry, the fines cigars are those with decades of age on them...

Was it always like that? Or was ageing and collecting to that extent something relegated to specialty tobacconists in London, Madrid or Hong Kong?

So, when did we become collectors and aficionados (to coin a term)? When did cigar somking start taking on special significance in the world, where we worried about 'periods of sickness' and ageing?

Was it the inception of the embargo when no more Cuban cigars were in circulation in the US? Was it the advent of the magazine? Any thoughts or ideas? If you look at evidence of time gone by...literature, movies, and other media...if someone wanted a smoke, they went out and bought one without regard to factories, dates and so on. Didn't seem to matter if the cigar was "fresh" or had 5 or 10 years of age on it.

Thinking about this a little more...I doubt if the cigars a voracious smoker like Winston Churchill were aged beyond what Alfred Dunhill was able to save for him. He'd buy a box, and smoke it (so it seems...perhaps someone else has different information or thoughts on the issue).

Was there such a thing as a 'sick period' back then, or is it a fiction now? Was there concern about ageing and smoking "properly" aged cigars?

Then again, we used to clip baseball cards to our bicycle spokes to make a motorized noise, and those cards today might be worth a lot of money; a '57 Chevrolet Bel Air was only a couple thousand dollars; good 'sneakers' were P.F. Fliers or Converse All-Stars that we used to play football, baseball, basketball, and run in. Our perception of "good" has certainly changed, and now we spend hundreds of dollars on specialty shoes, for each sport and each type of surface; our cars employ high tech electronics; and there are 50 or so different trading cards for every player in the major leagues...

But back to cigars - and here, really, is the question: when did they take on attributes and characteristics that they were something more than something to smoke???

Ah, those were the days!

Didn't Zino Davidoff "invent" the humidor? Perhaps about that time; probably coincided with improved packaging/shipping.

Are you serious?

People had humidors on their desks even prior to 1900. And what would improved shipping have to do with anything? Packaging is roughly the same as it was 50 years ago.

I don't claim to know the history, but cigar connoisseurship dates back at least as far as Zino Davidoff's marketing of the Chateau series of Cuban cigars in the 1940's and his "invention" of teh desktop humidor at about the same time. Certainly, contributing to connoisseurship was his 1984 book The Connoisseur's Book of the Cigar.

However, I am not sure it is accurate to say that collecting and storing and aging cigars is "popular" even today. Those of us who obsess about rare cigars and limited releases and box codes, etc. are very much in the minority. By far the vast majority of cigar smokers are those who buy their cigars at the local convenience store or order JR Alts and bundles from JR Cigars and think of Macanudo's as "high end" cigars.

Yet those of us who DO think like that still aspire to connoisseurship and seek knowledge. But was there always this concern about ageing? About the dreaded 'period of sickness'?

The Churchill Archives do give some brief mention of cigars - mostly through ledgers of purchases.

some examples:

May 1, 1934 - Telegram from Equitable Cigar Stands to WSC, confirming despatch of 1000 "Longfellow" cigars at price of $158.23.

April 1, 1935 - Letter from Henry Wilson & Sons, Cigar Importers, London, on his order for 500 cigars, pointing out that this was considerably less than he would smoke within 12 months, a period which was very short in which to condition and mature tobacco of this type.

June 9, 1938 - Letter from the PS to WSC to Equitable Cigar Stands, (Broadway, New York), order for 1,000 cigars, half to be "Royal Derby" and "half various, about the same size and shape, to be chosen by you".

"PS" in the above is "private secretary"

Some very good questions here.No matter what the subject, there will always be those who gravitate toward the "vintage" production.In some cases, there surely is justification for such preferences.In others,the rarity, itself, seems to be the draw, regardless of "actual" quality.More often,I tend to be the guy that walks into the cigar shop looking for a good smoke now,rather than a "collector".

Didn't Teddy Roosevelt have a desktop cigar humidor fashioned from an elephants' foot?

Doesn't matter to me when it started, it's gunna be here as long as there are enthusiats whos means allow it.

More power to them is all I can say.

Absolutely! All the power to those who have the means and wherewithall to acquire and smoke everything and anything they can get their hands on. That's not the question. When did the concern about ageing and such become so important?

ryj7x47,
I thought you were the one that made it popular.

quote:

Originally posted by jms2788:
ryj7x47,
I thought you were the one that made it popular.

LMAO, that's good stuff right there.

Suckling claims that 1997 is a key year:

http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Features/CA_Fea.../0,2344,1351,00.html

Perhaps when cigar smoking went mainstream and newer cigars tasted terrible, it became cheaper to age your own. As for the the practice of aging cigars in general, I remember reading that old cigar shops in London would hold tons of cigars for large clients and those stocks would sometimes go unclaimed and be resold later. The embargo certainly had an affect as well.

this might sound foolish but..............i buy all my cigars from cuba or in cuba, i like the whole collecting aspect of cuban cigars, it's because it's something i can do. i have a large humidor with a good stock of cubans. i have some old stuff but i have some pile of 06'. i'm not too sure when all this became popular but i know what i like. and i'm pretty sure my smokes are legit.

FrankN (listed and depicted in that article) is one of the people I considered to be one of the most erudite in the field, and whose palatte is, perhaps, the most refined. His humility and willingness to impart and share his knowledge is without parallel.

1997 was a key year for a lot of things...and for the Cuban cigar industry, it was a turn for the worse that eventually became a turn for the better another 4 or 5 years later. But even then, the cigars now are not like those of those prior times.

Thanks for finding that, 0707! Don't be a stranger!

Well, in that case, it's an activity, and a hobby...and the point I want to make is, at what point did that become the case more so than in the past? Fee-Fi notes that collectors are in the minority. But before the boom, before the internet, before the awareness, I still think that, among cigar smokers, the proportion of those who are engaged in this activity/hobby is significantly greater than in the past, where people just bought and smoked cigars.

quote:

Originally posted by p2:
i have a large humidor with a good stock of cubans. i have some old stuff but i have some pile of 06'. i'm not too sure when all this became popular but i know what i like. and i'm pretty sure my smokes are legit.

sounds legitimate to me

quote:

Originally posted by p2:
this might sound foolish but..............i buy all my cigars from cuba or in cuba, i like the whole collecting aspect of cuban cigars, it's because it's something i can do. i have a large humidor with a good stock of cubans. i have some old stuff but i have some pile of 06'. i'm not too sure when all this became popular but i know what i like. and i'm pretty sure my smokes are legit.

Send me a sampler pack and I'll tell you if they are real