"Mechanics of Smoke taste"

Someone asked about my "theory" that the flavor does not come from the smoke in a cigar.  This is probably a mis-reading of what I wrote, which is not hard to do.  My sentence structure always gave my teachers a headache, too.

What I said was that the buring tobacco at the lit end is not where the flavor comes from, but from the smoke's traveling through the bunch towards your mouth and it's interaction with the leaves.  As the unlit leaves in the bunch warm up, they release flavors which load the smoke with taste and nuance.  I said molecules, and I tend to believe that this is so although I am not a chemist, lol.  This is the same principle I guess as what hot water does to tea.  You are not drinking hot water, you are drinking tea.  But the hot water releases flavors and tannins that are locked into the structure of the dried tea in much the same way as the smoke leaches flavor from the cold tobacco in the bunch.  So while you are smoking the product of the lit end and nothing else, that smoke does not come off the cherry loaded with flavor.  That flavor only arrives at your mouth because it is drawn from the leaves, the part of the bunch that is not burning. 

Again, this is just what I think, maybe a flavorologist will step forward with the real truth, haha.