As you may already know, tobacco had been around for a very long time before Christopher Columbus discovered it in 1492 when he sailed the ocean blue. While he found it in what has since become the West Indies tobacco was grown much further north and south than Christopher realized and its use had spread even further a field.

By the time Christopher discovered tobacco it may have already found its way beyond the Arctic Circle but that tobacco is a far cry from the tobacco that we smoke today. The taste of that early tobacco could only be described as bitter so it's no wonder that the Indians who grew and smoked it thought that it had medicinal properties.

The tobacco we smoke today all comes from just one variety that came back from the New World. Nicotina Tabacum was the name given to that original variety but since then there has been much work done to improve on the original and the number of hybrids that modern tobacco has moved through can possibly be measured in the hundreds of thousands.

The Spaniards were the first to look for ways of improving on the tobacco brought back from the New World and someone whose name is now lost in the mists of time decided to apply the principles of wine making to the tobacco leaf and so began the long cycle of changes that has brought tobacco to the point where it is today.

But don't think that we have reached a point where further development of tobacco has stopped because it most certainly hasn't. Development and experimentation continues and there's every chance that the tobacco that appears in cigars a hundred years from now will be quite different from what we smoke today.