Other than the greatest wines from the early half of the 20th century, I’ve smelt nothing as complex as the finest oud. Great wine expresses itself through the medium of fruit; oud expresses itself through the medium of wood.

Like wine, ouds vary enormously in price. None are inexpensive and some are extraordinarily pricey. I’ve experienced ouds ranging from $30 to $1000 a milliliter. The greatest leave one in a daze, almost a trance.

The wild trees (less-expensive ouds are made from farmed trees) are rare. They must be at least 40-years old and attacked by a fungus that turns the wood black. Only a small proportion is vulnerable to the fungus. Depending on the oud, it may contain every point on the odor effects diagram. The finest ouds constantly change and continuously present a new odor profile. 

Oud is exalting because it’s woody (near the stimulating corner of the chart) and, at the same time, erogenic. (If I’m not careful, my cat will lick off any oud I’ve applied on even the tiniest spot.) It is usually balsamic—the narcotic side of the OED—and may often have floral and fruity notes.

Fine oud offers a seemingly endless variety of odor and of odor effects. Like very fine wines, it has terroir, a phenomenon described in many ways, but that I recognize by a peculiar sense of having smelt the aroma in the distant past, but with no actual memory of having done so. There’s a strange familiarity and dèja vu quality.

When I was working on Oud for Brooklyn Perfume Company, I incorporated a maximum of contrasting odor effects within a given odor profile. The only challenging corner was the anti-erogenic, represented by vetiver alone. The perfume contains three different ouds. The ouds I used from Laos and Malaysa were “transcendental” or “etheric,” and hence stimulating, while the Hindi oud is pretty funky and clearly erogenic. It is true, the ouds were expensive, but they are so powerful that very little does a lot.

Brooklyn Perfume Company’s Oud presents much of the same odor profile, and while I can’t claim to have replicated the complexity of wild oud, Oud is made like a perfume from many years ago, rich in natural materials that often are, like the oud I include, very rare.