My home-brew Corojo 99, which produces very large leaves of nearly equal size from bottom to top, has the curious attribute that the near-bottom leaf cures and ferments to just about the same color as the near top leaf. Up top, of course, gets stronger and thicker, but not much darker. The very tip leaf (corona) does give me a dark maduro, though not quite oscuro.
I would guess that your suspicion of the "oscuro" naming is correct. I'll bet there are more bales of that beautiful wrapper in some warehouse, that are labeled "oscuro".
Bob
I've never read any definition of oscuro, as it applies to cigar wrapper leaf, as anything but a color grade (as compared to maduro, which also often implies a process of very extended fermentation and so forth). All the photos of the wrapper color grades I've seen online show oscuro as being the absolute darkest, coal black-ish. Here is a definition from an article:
"This black-as-night wrapper shade is achieved by leaving the leaves on the plant as long as possible, by using only the leaves from the top of the plant, and by fermenting them for an especially long time. Most often Brazilian or Mexican in origin, oscuro wrappers are often very rough, a result of the extra fermentation. This category is sometimes referred to as "black," "negro" or "double maduro." "
Whereas these Corojo oscuro wrapper leaves run the grade from claro to claro maduro, generally what I would call caramel.
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Your leaves do sound very curious. As far as I can intuit, leaf darkness comes from a combination of chemicals and sun exposure doing something to the local cells that make them more prone to this change during curing and fermentation (this is why I reckon higher tobacco leaf
tips can be darker: they're got more alkaloids and they're more out of the shade of the leaves above them than the rest of the leaf). It goes back to what you were saying in your explanation of signalling differences in varieties but in this case the signalling also seems to be affected by other aspects of nature and farming. (I'd find your passage but I'd barely come to grips with which of the 52 main sub-forums the original post was in before the gods/elves shuttled it off to some new dark nook, never to be seen again).
