Does this help????
Maduro continues to be a lose term in the cigar world. Widely used to describe any cigar with a dark colored wrapper, the term has been commonly misconstrued. It doesn’t help that some cigars being produced today call themselves maduro based on color alone. In this article we dove into the Cigar Press archives pulling photos from various factories in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua representing the good, the bad, and the ugly…truth, on what a maduro wrapper traditionally is, and look at a couple assumptions that tend to go hand in hand with dark wrappers.
Maduro is a Spanish word that translates to mature, or ripe in English. The translation of the word maduro is a great window that helps us look into an explanation for what this wrapper is all about. When putting the translation into cigar perspective one of the first things that comes to mind is how tobacco is harvested when it reaches maturity. A tobacco plant can be categorized into three basic groups of leaves called primings. Volado is the lowest set of leaves closest to the ground (first harvested), Seco is the middle set of leaves (second harvested), and Ligero is the top set of leaves. Ligero tobacco receives the most sunlight, has the most flavor and body strengths on the plant, and is the last priming to be harvested. Since the leaves on this priming are on the plant the longest, they have more time to mature on the plant, or “ripen on the vine,” if you will. The ligero leaves will also physically be thicker with a dense texture, which is a crucial component in producing authentic maduro wrappers. In order to correctly produce maduro wrappers one must use the thickest and heartiest leaves on the plant in order for them to survive the tedious fermentation process.
Maduro isn’t a tobacco from one region or seed-variety (the broadleaf-seed maduro is perceived more often than not as one with the sweetest characteristic. Connecticut Broadleaf Maduro is probably the most recognized maduro in the market). Maduro is, more-or-less, a result of repeated fermentation that is seen through taste and texture in the smoke.
