Connecticut River Valley shade

Pale golden claro with a satin surface and almost no visible veining. The flavor is restrained by design: sweet cream, cedar, dry hay, salted butter and a light woody finish, with essentially no pepper. It has low nicotine and burns cool and slow, and it is elastic enough that skilled rollers can stretch it thin. Its function is to soften and sweeten - it can make a moderately strong filler read as mild, and it is easily overwhelmed by an aggressive blend underneath.

Because the crop is grown for wrapper, priming is graded on size, color and integrity rather than strength. Leaves are picked in successive passes up the stalk over several weeks, with the middle passes yielding the largest and most uniform wrapper.

Sandy glacial outwash loam over gravel along the Connecticut River in Hartford County - light, fast-draining and easily warmed in spring. The soil is poor enough to keep the leaf thin, and heavily managed with irrigation and fertility programs.

A short northern growing season of roughly 90-100 days, with the crop grown under white gauze tents that raise humidity and temperature under the cloth while diffusing the light. Without the tents the leaf would be thick, dark and unusable as fine wrapper.

Shade tents were introduced to the valley around 1900 to imitate Cuban Partido conditions, and the region supplied the world's benchmark claro wrapper for most of the twentieth century. At its peak the valley had many thousands of acres under cloth.

Sharply contracted - land cost, labor cost and Ecuadorian competition have reduced acreage to a small fraction of its mid-century peak, and most cigars labeled Connecticut now carry Ecuadorian Connecticut-seed leaf.