Blog & Cigar News | Mardo Cigars

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Mondays with Mardo's. I'm Gerard. And this week, we're going to talk about everything I think I know about cigar wrappers. We're going to try to hit types, flavors, most common, most popular. They say just stick onto one type or explore as a beginner. I don't know what that means, but what we're going to do is we're going to talk about what I think I know about cigar wrappers. One of the things that I have learned is that Ecuador... I was looking at this little dried up leaf I have here, but before I even get to this little prop here, I heard the country of Ecuador focuses a lot on making cigar wrappers. There's a big difference between growing cigar tobacco for wrapper use, and then you have your filler and your binder. When it comes to wrapper use, it's a lot more of a delicate process.

You need to caress it, sing to it, dance around it and play all kinds of beautiful music. Just kidding. But it is a lot more of a delicate process. One of the ways to identify if a leaf is going to be used for wrapper or not, is when you look at the leaf as a whole, you look at the distance between the veins. So, for instance, this one, the veins are maybe barely about an inch apart. And that tells me that the distance is not great enough to be used as a wrapper. Reason being is because if I were to use this leaf as a wrapper, it's going to have too much veins on it, so therefore it's not going to be as pliable, it's not going to be as pretty, and it's just not meant to be used as a wrapper. So, when I look at a leaf and if I see the distance between the veins' pretty distant, that lets me know that this leaf is used as a wrapper. And also the whole makeup of the leaf is going to be just very pretty. It's going to be beautiful.

Hopefully, the contrast of the leaf color is going to be very continuous. It's going to be fluid. It's going to have all one shade. So, that's going to be a huge indicator of that being a cigar leaf used for wrapper. Now, then you have different types of wrappers. You have Habano, you have Sumatra, you have Connecticut Broadleaf, then you have Maduro. I'm just going to stick to Maduro. A Maduro leaf is going to be something that's going to be much darker. Naturally, Maduro Leafs used for wrapper is going to be very blotchy. The reason why it's getting blotchy is because that leaf is being aged. And when it's being aged, it's going to be introduced to a lot of time. And due to time, it's going to have a breakdown process. When things break down, it's a natural process, so therefore we're not really sure what's going to be uniform and not when it comes to color contrast. So, as it gets darker, just like skin pigmentation, some area's going to be darker and some area's going to be lighter.

So, that is one indicator that you're going to see when a Maduro is naturally used and not painted on a cigar, is that it's in its natural state. It's not being altered with, they're not using food grade paint to make the Maduro wrapper look a lot more beautiful. Now, what is the purpose of a Maduro wrapper and what does it do? The starch is turning into a sugar, so as darker the Maduro wrapper is getting, the more ability of the sweetness to be pronounced because the starch is being processed into sugar. And you want to use this very sweet Maduro wrapper on a cigar blend that's very strong, so you can tame it down and bring it down a notch a little bit to present some sweetness to it. So, that is what I know up to this point in my career about cigar wrapper leaves. Other than that, I'll see you guys next week. Remember to follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook. Tell me what you think about this video in the comments. And tell your friends to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Peace out.