How long did it take for you to develop your "nose"?

[ashauler]

Intriguing idea. I'd be willing to risk failure and embarrassment, but not under those circumstances and certainly not for five cigars.

I think it's interesting, and there must be some message there, that we've gone from me trying to help a newbie not feel inadequate because he doesn't taste food in his cigars to some getting up in arms about their belief system being challenged. It's a shame that there are very few pre-boom cigar smokers left in this world. I feel so alone and misunderstood.
I quite understand why CA invented a way, flawed as it may be, to review cigars. Those smokers who lived through the boom understand the damage they caused. The shortage of tobacco, the really bad tobacco and the outrageous prices they had to endure because of that publications avarice.The problem is that many new to the hobby don't realize that it's a literary device and end up feeling unworthy because all they taste is tobacco. Certainly, cigar reviews would be boring without associating what we taste in our cigars with food, but there has to be a better way. What that way is, I have no idea. I'm not a wordsmith. My metaphors and similes are amateurish but someone out there should be able to.

Doc.

Well, the rules of the pot pass are pretty much set, the same for everyone. I'm not a rich man so 5 cigars is about the best I could add to the pot. I do have some pretty good cigars in the cooler though.

I don't think anyone here is extolling the virtues of the pompous and overblown reviews in CA...in fact, I think you'll find plenty of posts on here disparaging that rag. That being said, there is no getting around the fact that something common between the reviewer and the audience must be used to relate the experience of smoking a particular cigar. Since the "taste" of the smoke is the most important thing, at least to me, what else is there to use?

I know, nobody eats leather or wood.

ETA: I wasn't smoking cigars during the boom, but, trust me, I have lots of recent experience with the taste of poorly grown, badly fermented, horribly processed tobacco.