Last evening I met a real perfume enthusiast. He is actively researching and sharing perfumes with other people and has so far bought 40 full bottles, sold many samples from those, and bought a total of 1400 samples of other perfumes.

He showed me a quite broad range of perfumes, starting with Pineward Perfume and ending on 432. My favourite of the whole range of perfumes was probably Viento Puelche by 432 – fresh, like the sea, but also carrying some scent of the mountain and the forest.

What fascinated me in this whole evening of perfume degustation was his narration of the perfumes: the more special a material in the list seemed, the more excited he was. One perfume contained actual Russian leather that was extracted with ultrasound, and with the perfume, he also got a sample with that very material. Other perfumes had materials in them with very specific descriptors including the exact origin of the material. For the scent, this can be relevant, but in this context, I realized, it is mostly relevant for the story.

What also fascinated me was that when I asked him if there is a perfume that doesn't exist yet but that he would like to have, he said that he wouldn't want to blend his own perfume because he thinks that the result would be terrible, but that he does have some ideas that he hasn't smelled yet.

His anchor material was the Latschenkiefer (the Mountain Pine), which reminds him of holidays in the mountains. He also loves Frankincense and Mandarin.

To me, that's already an almost perfect pretext:

Sun on the south wall of a mountain chapel – the resin in the old wood going soft in the afternoon heat, and someone has left a peeled mandarin on the sill.

or:

A wool sweater that spent the morning in the pines, brought indoors at noon – the cold mountain air still in the fibers, warming into something sweet and resinous against the skin.

Given that I only have one day to make it before he leaves to Köln again, the choice falls on the simpler version. The preliminary formula:

• Mountain Pine / Latschenkiefer
• Frankincense Rivae
• Green Mandarin
• Labdanum Tincture
• MCT-Oil
• Cedarwood Morocco
• Lime

I ended up regretting the Lime a little bit and overdosing on the Latschenkiefer, so I decided to make a second version in Ethanol. In that one I halved the Mountain pine, left out the Lime and also the Cedarwood, for a start, and added Pink Pepper, as originally intended. The first impression is a deliciously Mandarin-forward Parfum (23% total aromatic load, something to possibly reconsider). Given how such a blend tends to macerate, not a bad start. And the Mountain pine is holding nicely in the background, not shifting the whole register into a grandma-medicinal one.