I will not rate cigars on any numerical scale, although, while I have an opinion about rating systems, I do not berate those who do. I simply know what I like. I believe most smokers do, too.

When it comes to cigars, I’m old fashioned. When those of us in the business rated a cigar it was either “good,” or “not so good.” The closest we got to describing taste was “sweet as a nut,” “nutty,” or “like a nut.” But we never described the nut.

In one of the magazines recently, I found a DiMeola described as tasting like coconut.

Here’s a true illustration of “tasters’ folly.” A magazine about wine did a series of ratings and descriptions of some Bordeaux wines of a certain vintage. In the descriptions there were different references to raspberries. The tasters found wines containing the flavor of raspberries of many descriptions—fresh raspberries, crushed raspberries, raspberry purée. I wondered how there could be so many nuances in the perception of raspberries intermingled—liquefied—in all those wines. I have similar feelings about some cigar descriptions.

Cigar ratings serve a purpose in some quarters. They help to sell magazines. They also have helped to focus public attention on cigars. To that extent this is a good thing.

A cigar taster allows his imagination, his fantasies, to run rampant, then corrals them in writing.. While testing a cigar, he encourages his brain to summon impressions of taste and aroma and, in the act of committing them to paper, they become real. They are, indeed, “real” because no one can prove him wrong.

Then, having numerically “rated” certain aspects of each cigar, each taster puts everything together, and the results are combined so that a single number is reached. I’ve often wondered what happens when the aggregate falls on the cusp. Who decides which side of the “fence” the rating will fall, and how is that decision made? I mean, there’s hardly any difference between an “89” and “90?” Yet, “90” looks so much better on the page. If the aggregate comes out “89.5,” how is it decided in which direction the rounding goes?

One of the most fascinating and cogent treatises about judging cigars was written in a prior generation—before magazines on the subject were even dreamt of—by the great American humorist, Mark Twain, who was also an inveterate cigar smoker. “If I cannot smoke in Heaven, I shall not go!” he once said. Here is his brief essay, “Concerning Tobacco,” which perhaps was written with a bit of tongue- in-cheek, but which may be closer to the truth than those variations of raspberries in that wine.