When I light up a good cigar, I describe it by saying: "This is a good cigar." But merely saying a cigar is good isn't good enough anymore. Describing a cigar's flavor these days requires a palate so discerning that it can recognize such things as "herbal earthiness with coffee bean and cinnamon tones, and a woody finish." To see what that means, I suppose I could take a sprig of parsley, a handful of dirt, some coffee beans, and a dash of cinnamon, an old shoe, and a piece of wood, then roll it into a Connecticut Shade wrapper and smoke it. On the other hand, I think I'll just stick with the contents of my humidor and simply say that my cigars taste like tobacco.

During the last couple of years, as cigars grew in popularity, somebody decided that all these new cigar chompers needed a social destination where they could smoke without being yelled at by other customers. Hence, the cigar bar. However, while every cigar may have its own pleasant aroma, when you take 200 people smoking 90 brands and put them together in one room, you wind up with a cloud of smog more deadly than the atmosphere of Los Angeles on a bad day. Once, when I wandered into one of these wood-paneled little rooms, I detected the bouquet of a foot in need of Lubriderm. It turned out not to be a foot at all; rather it was a robusto clenched between someone's teeth. I also identified such scents as rotting leaves from an October lawn, old FedEx stuffings, fresh dog droppings, rubber with tones of earwax, plastic with a hint of nylon, an old telephone from the 1930s, damp newspapers, and filler made of discarded vacuum cleaner bags. I haven't smelled a burning sock yet, but then again, a new cigar bar opens every day.

My advice to those of you on your way to a cigar bar is this: Never take your best cigars. Take your third or fourth best cigars. Or better yet, find a small stick, drill a hole through the center, and smoke that. With all the other foul fogs wafting into your nose, you won't be able to tell the difference between a stick and a Hoyo anyway.

All tobacco leaves are made by God and therefore all tobacco leaves are wonderful. Only man can take a perfectly wonderful leaf and turn it into a bad cigar. Or -- God forgive me -- into a cigarette! I can't speak for God but I would dare say that when God made tobacco He envisioned hand-rolled double coronas and not machine-made Ultra Light 100s.

For a cigar smoker, a cigar is a more than enough sensory stimulation all by itself. But a cigarette smoker, extracting no resort to chewing while he smokes. (Imagine drawing on a Cohiba with a Chiclet in your mouth!) I have even seen cigarette smokers puff away during a meal.

Besides never eating while I smoke, there one food I can't eat before I smoke. Nuts. When I do happen to have a handful of nuts, I rinse out my mouth prior to lighting up a cigar. I can't be sure if it's a remnant of cashew or a fragment of tobacco from the end of my cigar. And swallowing tobacco disturbs my peristalysis.

I'm not telling you what you should do or shouldn't do, I'm just relating what I can't do. In the end, you see, it all comes down to personal taste. If you're a cigar aficionado and you want to describe your corona as having "a hint of mint with piano notes and a fried filet finish," go right ahead

As for me, I'm going to sit down and pull out a little treat I've been saving for some time. It has hints of toasted oats and dried fruit with cinnamon notes and a cocoa finish. No, it's not a cigar.

It's a chocolate granola bar.