Views from a Smoke-Filled Room

LOS ANGELES – Welcome to The Great Cellophane Debate!

Happily, there’s no right or wrong answer as to whether you should keep the cellophane wrapper on your cigars or remove it. It depends on what you intend to do with your cigars and how you plan to store them.

There are many in the cigar intelligentsia who will swear on any stack of religious texts you care to place in front of them that a cigar must be removed from its cellophane wrapper (or aluminum or glass tubes for that matter) in order to allow it to age.

There are others who believe this is balderdash (or worse) and that cigars can mature nicely inside their wrappings, perhaps over a longer period.

Then there is a third group – of which I am a member – which is more worried about cigar destruction from the inside out than about aging. This is because of the dreaded cigar beetle.

Without going into the biology of cigar beetles, suffice it to say that these pests are latent in cigar leaves and if the temperature and/or humidity rise for any length of time to more than 80 degrees (F) and/or about 80% relative humidity, the eggs buried in the leaf will hatch. These critters then gorge themselves on the surrounding tobacco, boring a small hole to the surface of the cigar and potentially moving onto other cigars!

Once hatched, beetles have been well known to bore through cellophane on their way out of a cigar, but having adjacent cigars remaining in their cellophane wrappers can sometimes slow down or stop the process of the destruction of a whole box. Better safe than sorry, so it’s recommended here that you keep your cigars in their cellophane wrappers.

What about aging? There’s no such thing as "fast aging" on cigars. If you’re going to do some aging, do it seriously and keep your cigars "working" for at least a year. Two to three years would help and five to seven years is even better. Hong Kong expert Min Ron Nee, author of the awesome "Illustrated Encyclopedia of Post-Revolution Havana Cigars," is convinced that long-term aging is not adversely impacted by retaining the cellophane wrappers on cigars and in some cases can help.

If you must remove the cellophane, take great care not to damage the wrappers, especially at the foot. And you’ll want to look in on your cigars regularly to be sure they’re beetle-free. For me, I remain confident in the power of cellophane to protect my cigars from wandering beetles and once a box is secured in my humidor at the right temperature and humidity, I think only about the day – five years or more from now – when they will be at their peak of flavor and aroma . . . which I will get to enjoy as I remove the cigar from its now-heavenly-scented cellophane cloak.

(Rich Perelman is editor-in-chief of CigarCyclopedia.com, offering comprehensive daily coverage of cigars, accessories, issues, people and prices at www.CigarCyclopedia.com.)

Rich Perelman

1/28/08

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