All cigar tobacco goes through a curing and fermentation process, but it takes more time and higher temperatures to make a leaf as dark as those used to wrap maduros. After being cured in a barn and turning brown, maduro wrappers are put into bulks to ferment. The weight of the tobacco, plus the moisture in the leaf, causes a chemical change. Impurities, namely ammonia, come off the leaves and heat is produced, turning starches to sugars. When the heat at the center of a bulk reaches the maximum allowed by the tobacco man, the bulk is taken apart, which lowers the temperature. Then it is rebuilt, and the process starts anew.
"Normally you turn the bulk at 115 degrees. Broadleaf, you can have it at 120-plus," says Eiroa. "Broadleaf takes forever."
Ernesto Perez-Carrillo, who makes maduro versions of his La Gloria Cubanas and El Rico Habanos, is still fermenting Connecticut broadleaf from the 1999 crop. He plans to use it this year. Connecticut shade, by comparison, can be ready in one year.
Some folks have been known to take a shortcut. "We've never been believers in the painted black maduros," says Eiroa. He describes one fast method of making a maduro known as the cooking method, which is done using a setup reminiscent of a stove-top espresso coffeemaker. "Picture one of those coffeemakers with the coffee in the bottom," he says. "Steam comes up into this one pot with the tobacco inside. The vapor leaks in and adds color to the tobacco. Another method is dipping the tobacco in dye—food coloring or whatever—or you put dye on a sponge."
Rushed methods, such as the ones Eiroa describes deliver maduros with unnatural colors, the darkest blacks and the eggplant purples. Eiroa shuns them, preferring the old-fashioned way. "We like the raw flavor of tobacco," he says. "We're very proud of our farms and what they produce."
The maduro cigars that are painted have drawn the contempt of savvier consumers. "Of course," writes PRCCaption on the cigaraficionado forums, "maduros are only good as long as they weren't painted that color."
Thankfully, the process of painting and rushing maduros to market was far more prevalent during the cigar boom than it is now. Most of today's maduros are the product of a great deal of patience and know-how on the part of the cigarmakers and tobacco growers responsible for the product. If you sit down tonight and light up a maduro cigar, there's a good chance that its outer leaf was planted in the ground many years ago.
CA
