Cigars - It'S A Small World: Tobaccos From Around The Globe

Most nonsmokers think of tobacco plants as interchangeable - if you've smoked one, you've smoked 'em all. But as anyone knows who has ever compared the taste of a premium cigar to a cheap one - or who has visited the Middle East, where an undreamt-of range of sweetly intense tobacco smells assault the tourist's nostril - nothing could be further from the truth. Tobacco plants vary as widely - and as consequentially - as any other plant. Here is a rough guide to a few of these differences - and the difference they make to smokers.

Going alphabetically, we begin with Aromatic Fire-Cured tobacco, grown in the western portions of Tennessee and Kentucky as well as in Virginia. Rich and slightly flowery, you'll find it used in snuff, cigarettes and as the less dominant partner in blends made for pipe smokers. On the other side of the world, there's a variant, another kind of fire-cured tobacco: strong-flavored Latakia, grown in Cyprus and Syria for use in Balkan and English pipe tobacco blends.

Then there's Brightleaf tobacco, which originated in North Carolina and, hence, is nicknamed "Virginia tobacco." (Well, whatever.) Developed in 1839, in response to smokers' demands for a milder tobacco than the dark fire-cured leaves commonly grown in the antebellum South, this tobacco owes its existence to a combination of industry and happenstance.

Farmers in nearby Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as farther-away Ohio, had been trying since the early part of the century to develop a lighter leaf, trying different ways of curing the plants. Abisha Slade of North Carolina, noticing that sandy soil tended to yield weaker plants, tried the expedient of planting a gold-leaf plant in a field of seemingly-infertile sandy soil belonging to him. A clever idea, but all might still have been lost had Slade's slave, Stephen, not used charcoal to restart a curing fire that had gone out. The sudden heat turned the leaves yellow. Slade, noticing this, seized on it and made of it a method: grow plants in poor soils and then heat-cure them with charcoal (rather than fire-curing them with, well, fire).

In any case, Slade's discovery - or Stephen's discovery - had immediate economic implications. Not only did American smokers now have the less acrid tobacco they'd been looking for, but Virginia farmers had something for which they'd hardly dared hope - an economic use for the previously infertile Appalachian piedmont.

Farmers stuck with otherwise-useless lands suddenly had a cash crop - and the Piedmont counties came to dominate US tobacco production. The Civil War only increased the popularity of Brightleaf tobacco, as Confederate soldiers passing through the railway hub of Danville, VA, acquired a taste for the popular local variety, and brought that taste with the to the front.

Trading it among each other - and, during breaks in battle, with Union soldiers - these young men served as Brightleaf's unappointed press agents. The Civil War created a national market for the crop and ensured that Virginia's Caswell and Pittsylvania Counties were the only counties in the South to find themselves richer after the war than before it.

White Burley tobacco, meanwhile, furnishes a true example of evolution in action. At the tail-end of the Civil War, an Ohio farmer, George Webb, finds that a few of his seedlings look sick and whitish; in the field, they grow to normal size but remain light-colored. He put them on sale at a Cincinnati market - not as a smokable tobacco but as a novelty plant. But by the following year he'd already decided that the air-cured, mild-tasting leaf was worth a risk, and planted ten acres of seedlings from that first generation of mild white plant. With time, the new variety - White Burley, produced seemingly by chance genetic mutation and encouraged in its development by cultivation - became the primary ingredient in chewing tobacco as well as in American pipe and cigarette tobacco. Meanwhile, Red Burley, popular in the mid-nineteenth century, sank into obscurity and eventual extinction; nowadays White Burley is generally just Burley.