This morning, I lit up a wonderful Crowned Heads Tennessee Waltz, Jon Huber’s tribute to how his grandparents met at a dance while “Tennessee Waltz” was playing. It’s a great cigar.
If you can get through the first couple of inches.
That opening hits hard. It has a dark, earthy character and is loaded with nicotine. Even though the body is medium, the strength could put you in the fetal position if you’re not ready for it.
But then it changes completely.
The nicotine drops significantly, and the profile takes on a much brighter character filled with nuts, baking spices, citrus, and cedar.
It made me think about a video I recently watched of a roller bunching leaves for a cigar. They were using standard book bunching, stacking the main filler leaves together. But every so often, they’d insert a short section of visibly different tobacco at a specific point along the length of the bunch.
Intrigued, I reached out to my friend, Andrew, who blends and rolls his cigars for his own small brand. I asked him about what I saw. He doesn’t intentionally sequence different leaves to create transitions, but he confirmed that tobacco is routinely redistributed along the length of the bunch through backfilling.
Tips and tails are torn where the filler becomes uneven, then placed back into designated parts of the bunch.
Then a recent conversation with another blender compelled me to look into this further. He is also a composer and shared a recording of one of his songs with me. I told him he should build a cigar based on that song. He replied that the song gets angry near the end.
I joked that he could put a bunch of ligero near the head so the cigar becomes an ass-kicker. He laughed and said, “Right before the band, it just knocks you out!”
Then it hit me.
Transitions can be deliberately inserted.
The interesting thing is that for years, like many people, I thought cigar construction was a much simpler process of putting whole leaves together. But as I’ve often mentioned, blenders have a lot of options when formulating a blend.
Bunching is a critical part of that formulation.
The blender isn’t only deciding which leaves go into the cigar. They’re also deciding how different parts of those leaves are arranged inside it.
Taking Advantage of a Tobacco Leaf’s Chemical Variations
I realize that title sounds a little technical, but the idea is simple.
A tobacco leaf isn’t chemically uniform from one end to the other.
One study1 examined 28 neutral aroma compounds at 48 different points across a single cured tobacco leaf. Neutral aroma compounds are chemicals that contribute to the aroma of tobacco. The word neutral doesn’t mean they’re bland or odorless. It refers to how they’re classified chemically.
The researchers found that those compounds weren’t spread evenly across the leaf. The concentrations changed from the tip to the base, from the main vein toward the edges, and from one part of the leaf to another. In other words, the tip of a leaf isn’t chemically identical to the tail.
Now think about what happens when that leaf is placed inside a cigar.
If the tip faces the foot, the smoker encounters those regions in one order. Turn the leaf around, and the order is reversed.
Tear portions from the tip and tail and place them elsewhere in the bunch, and the sequence changes again.
The blender hasn’t changed the leaf.
They’ve changed the way you encounter it.
Andrew added another layer to this. “In my opinion, DR and Nicaraguan bunchers handle those break points very differently.” He didn’t elaborate on the differences, but his comment suggests that how those sections are placed back into the bunch may vary between cigar-making traditions.
Inserting Different Tobacco in Specific Areas
Orientation is only part of it.
A buncher can also place a different tobacco at a specific point along the length of the cigar.
That was what caught my attention in the video. The main filler leaves were Colorado in color, while the short sections being inserted were dramatically darker. They weren’t simply pieces torn from the leaves already in the bunch. They appeared to be a different tobacco entirely.
My friend suggested they could have been fire-cured tobacco or possibly Andullo.
Whatever they were, their position in the bunch would determine when they affected the experience.
This isn’t merely theoretical. Wikipedia’s overview of cigar construction notes that some manufacturers deliberately place different tobaccos from one end of a cigar to the other to vary flavor, body, and strength throughout the smoke.2 That is exactly the kind of longitudinal blending I saw in the video: the blend can change because the tobacco itself changes as the burn line moves through the bunch.
That gives the blender another way to shape the experience. A stronger leaf could create a spike in strength. A more aromatic tobacco could brighten the profile. Something with a completely different character could redirect the cigar altogether.
And all that ties in with my experience with the Tennessee Waltz this morning. I don’t know this for certain, but it feels like stronger, darker tobacco was deliberately placed at the foot to create that heavy opening.
Not Every Transition Comes From Placement
Leaf placement and orientation aren’t the only ways a blender can create transitions. The entire blend is designed to change as it burns.
The blender chooses tobaccos with different combustion rates, densities, chemical compositions, primings, and levels of fermentation. Those leaves constantly interact with each other.
The cigar itself also changes as you smoke it. Heat moves through the remaining tobacco. Moisture and compounds carried by the smoke condense farther up the bunch. Your puff rate affects temperature and combustion.
Those changes are already part of the blend’s behavior.
So a transition doesn’t have to come from a different leaf being placed at a specific point. It can also come from the way the selected tobaccos develop together as the cigar burns.
Placement is another tool.
It gives the blender even more control over when those changes happen.
Back to the Waltz
Which brings me back to the Tennessee Waltz.
I can’t say how Jon Huber constructed the bunch or whether the transition I experienced was created through placement, orientation, or simply the way the blend develops as it burns.
But the progression feels deliberate.
The cigar begins with darkness, weight, and enough nicotine to put you in a dream state. Then the pressure lifts. The profile brightens. Baking spices, citrus, nuts, and cedar begin to move through the smoke. And the cigar starts to dance.
Maybe that was the intention all along. A heavy, awkward opening followed by the moment his grandparents found each other on the dance floor. I’ll probably never know for certain.
But I do know that I’ll never look at a bunch the same way again.
1 Jian-An Wang, Gai-He Yang, and Chun-Xia Li, “Zonal Distribution of Neutral Aroma Components in Flue-Cured Tobacco Leaves,” Phytochemistry Letters 24 (April 2018): 125–130, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phytol.2018.01.014. (sciencedirect.com)
2 “Cigar,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed July 15, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigar.
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