Tobacco Plant Vs Process, Is There A Botanist In The House?

This will be an interesting thread. Couple thoughts initially based on my own hobbiest research on the topic:
Cavendish IS a process, not a tobacco and yes, most distinctions you'll find between one type and another are a product of how they are cured and processed. IE, red Virginia is not a "strain" of Virginia, but a product of how it's cured, and not necessarily beholden to a specific region of where its grown.
Regarding what would happen if Virginia was processed like a Kentucky burley (assuming you mean dark-fired in this instance) - it wouldn't have the same qualities as the Kentucky, as the sugar content is higher. You'd end up with a sweeter dark-fired leaf, not to be confused with flue-cured Virginia, which is a different process.
Where the tobacco is grown does have an influence on the leaf's final flavor, but for the most part, you're talking Virginia, Burley and Oriental (with varietals), each with their own distinct qualities, which are then further altered and enhanced by curing methods. Whether or not the curing method leads to a new "name" for the leaf, well... that just depends.

This will be one to watch for sure. Sadly the only thing I have to offer has already been mentioned, that Cavendish is a process.

Don’t confuse types of tobacco plants with types of tobacco products.

Perhaps one way to sort thru the types and organize them would be to research tobacco production in historical context . It must have been extremely simple at some starting point when plantars started their cultivation . Over the course to time , without any standardization , rules , or even language the tobacco trade probably grew in strange unanticipated ways , like the cavendish example you used , it was simply old steamy leaf from the bottom of a barrel sitting in the sun or in a ships bilge .
What is Maryland 609 , the web says it's just another burley .?

You are asking many questions in one.

First off, I’m not a botanist, nor a professional anything to do with tobacco, or even a very good person. But, I have been dabbling in growing and curing tobacco for five years, only now feeling adequate in my understanding of growing. But...
First off, if you check the online tobacco seed vendors, you’ll see hundreds of heirloom and hybrid varieties. But, farmers have only a handful of commercial varieties. I’ll talk mostly about. Virginias, as that is what I feel the most adequate. In the US the main variety of Virginia is “ Virginia Gold” which has several hybrids that you can select for your region which will give the best commercial results. So, really one seed set makes up almost the entirety of the Virginias.
In the US we pipe smokers get ours mainly from the cigarette industry, which uses state of the art equipment to flue cure, controlling the humidity and temperature with technological precision. Most of what Pipe tobacconist want is the bottom set of leaves. Everything midway and up is very heavy in nicotine, better for cigarettes. Controlling temperature, humidity, and time, it can be cured yellow or golden, or it can be further fermented in the kilns to reds and browns. It can even be air cured, flash cured. Then after curing it can be made into a Cavendish, blakeney process, pressed, or twisted.
Then we get into Canadian and Ukrainian “varieties.” I have no idea what a tobacconist would call it. But, these varieties can be cured to more lemony leaf. Both look and smell and cure the same. The only thing I have noticed is that Ukrainian has bigger leaves with shorter stalks. It almost looks like rustica. But, they taste the same. I have grown both varieties, and I can’t discern between then bu taste. But, it cures exactly as expected if grown in Alabama verses what was grown from Canada down to the Northern US.

But, I have no idea whether the seed stock would remain the same if I kept using my own harvested seeds from this variety or strain.
There is huge disconnects between botanists who supply the seeds, the farmers, the processers, and the tobacconists. They do not use the same jargon, terminology, or descriptions. For example, Other than the tobacconist’s world, there is no such thing as “red Virginias.” They are just Virginias, or brightleafs, to some they are fermented Virginias, or socialized Virginias. It’s like they all define things differently.
When you get into cigar leaf, the same seeds can be grown differently, cured differently, and then fermented differently. Lots of variety.
Can burley be flue cured? Some do it, but you don’t get a brightleaf from it. But it can be air cured, sun cured, and aged. The. It can be toasted, pressed, shredded, cavendished, etc etc....
I feel like that guy from Forrest Gump, listing ways to cook shrimp...
Casings can be different, toppings, blends... there really is an art to it. With all of this, there can be a huge exponential variety of ways to prepare the same leaf.

Crap, I really can spell better than my huge meaty thumbs on this iphone will allow.

Gonna need to keep an eye on this thread

An informative starting place would be Milton Sherman's book, All About Tobacco.

The chapters covering Cavendish and Orientals are particularly helpful.

I don't think you actually want to talk to a botanist as much as put together a panel discussion of farmers, buyers, and blenders to try and coordinate all the different terms they separately use for the same things at different stages of production.
I am only at the very beginning of the path that Cosmic is already walking, but I can tell you that this book "Making Tobacco Bright" by Barbara Hahn insisted that there is no significant genetic difference between burleys, Virginia's, or orientals. All the things that lead to the hundreds of varieties of tobacco blends and flavors available to us is based on soil/climate and processing.

I don't know the scientific terminology, but isn't a Chihuahua and a Great Dane the same species? And, a Lincoln Red Rose and a Black Jade Rose the same? Yet they smell, look and grow differently. If it were merely where these plants were grown, then why is it that when I order some Canadian Virginias, they are completely different from Virginia Gold? And, some varieties of burleys and Virginias were developed in the same area.

Plus, if you flue cure a burley, you don't anything nearly as sweet as a Virginia.
I need to read the book, I guess. It could be that we are both grossly over-simplifying what is probably a very complex explanation. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

I don't know the scientific terminology, but isn't a Chihuahua and a Great Dane the same species? And, a Lincoln Red Rose and a Black Jade Rose the same? Yet they smell, look and grow differently. If it were merely where these plants were grown, then why is it that when I order some Canadian Virginias, they are completely different from Virginia Gold? And, some varieties of burleys and Virginias were developed in the same area.

Plus, if you flue cure a burley, you don't anything nearly as sweet as a Virginia.
I need to read the book, I guess. It could be that we are both grossly over-simplifying what is probably a very complex explanation. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
BTW, thanks Javan for fixing that. I appreciate it.

"blakeney" process... I am not exactly sure how they do it, but it seems to be a process McClelland used to sort of (toast?) the Virginias. But, I say toast, because it kind of tasted toasted. They had a whole line of Mcclelland blends that used the process. If another blender or manufacturer is using it, they aren't listing it. But, it tastes like a middle ground between McClelland's VAs and C&D's VAs.

While I am not a botanist, and thus certainly no expert in phylogeny, I am a molecular plant biologist so I do have some knowledge on speciation and such.

I am going to work with an example that is easy to imagine: Brassica oleraceae. Broccoli, cauliflower, red cabbage, green cabbage, Brussel sprouts etc... All of them look very different and taste completely different as well and still they all are the same species: Brassica oleraceae. How did these difference arise? Due to certain mutation that got fixated due to selection. Yes indeed, even a single point mutation in a critical gene can cause huge 'phenotypic differences'. In other words, a single mutation has the power to completely change for example the shape of the leaf, or the content of sugar in certain parts of the plant. So in some way we can relate Virginia, Burley, Orientals etc... to broccoli, cauliflower etc... If we take a single mother plant, and of this mother plant we take the seeds and grow them up isolated from each other, within a few decades or centuries certain mutations and genes will become fixated (through a bottleneck effect/ genetic drift) causing varietal families like Orientals. Now within these genetical backgrounds, we can select for other traits. For example in broccoli, we can select for how long it takes until it is ready to harvest, or the amount of chlorophyll that determines the green colour, the bitterness etc... It will still look like a broccoli, but we can change some of its traits. Now those would be the 10000 of different hybrids and cultivars that are available within each 'varietal family'. Most of the seed stocks that are currently available are F1 hybrids: They have hybrid vigor and are uniform in their traits (flowering time, sugar content etc...). If these would pollinate themselves, we will get a F2 generations.... and these can differ in flowering time, height etc... which is not wanted in large scale agriculture but could be very interesting for the amateur grower. I hope this has been a bit informative. Again, I am not an expert and certainly not in tobacco but this looks like the most viable theory with my current knowledge.

Thanks Bazunga, that makes sense! So, that makes me wonder about the differences between burleys and cigar leaf or dark tobacco. Why is it that we can have burleys that taste like cigar leaf, even without the fermentation if they are different genetically, and some cigar leaf tastes like plain old burleys? Maybe just some cross overs?

Well, actually it could be they genetically barely differ at all. In research, we use homozygous lines that self fertilise and practically identical but if I just change one nucleotide (so I change one letter in the DNA code) the 2 plants can look completely different. In other words, you do not need major genetical differences to see big changes in how the plant looks like or tastes like. Genetically, you probably will not be able to tell much difference between any tobacco variety except for the odd mutation here and there and some slight variation of the same genes. I do not think there is a clear genetic distinction of what is burley and what is cigar leaf etc... it just grew that way historically. One guy has an odd plant in his field of Virginias, it looks different and tastes different so he starts breeding with it and calls it Burley. That is how we got cabbages, broccoli etc... Different people took wild cabbage and selected for the thing they liked: some liked the leafs(cabbage) and others liked to eat the flower buds (broccoli). Speciation is not always clear, to this very day there is still no clear definition of what makes a species and what makes a variety, it is not a black and white thing but more of a spectrum.
I found an interesting article that makes my point: . Look at figure 1 and read the abstract. Basically this mutation caused a Burley like phenotype and can thus help breeders to better select for Burley like traits and can be used as a marker for Burley tobacco breeding. This is still a subtle differences but for example in this paper on Arabidopsis, you can clearly see the difference if one gene is disturbed in the plant. 'Ler' is the wild variety, all the others like ga5 means that they removed that one gene from the plant but all the rest is exactly the same.

It all smokes nice in my pipe. In all seriousness, this is incredibly interesting.