Oud Yusuf Thailand 2019
Our artisan owned a small patch of forest where he grew aquilaria crassna trees which he never cut down. Each morning, you saw him walking down the forest path with his dog behind him, chisel in hand, looking for the most infected trunks.
With a big smile on his face, you saw him patiently picking at each trunk, chiseling out only brown shavings of resinated heartwood, mindful as he spared the uninfected portions so the tree could continue to grow and yield more agarwood.
The maximum amount of raw oud wood he could harvest in one day was ten kilograms, so the amount of oil they could produce in one month was very limited. But his few tolas were dearer to me than twenty kilograms of thoughtlessly harvested oud.
What made Oud Yusuf even more special was that it was distilled from 100% organic agarwood trees that were harvested and maintained in the most ethical way possible.
Because of the care he put in every step of the distillation process, from the precise selection of the most infected heartwood, to the grinding, soaking and cooking of his oud, he was able to achieve a level of quality, beauty and sheer perfection in his oil no other distiller could match. And the lilacs and the lilies, the honeydew, and the apricot notes in his oud all attested to his mastery and love of this craft.
People had been trying to bottle lilies for as long as I could remember. No one had done it right. Lilacs? Even worse. You might have thought a little vanilla, some rose, a dab of orris, violet leaf, and sandalwood could get close, but it was never the same. Then there was Oud Yusuf, which somehow smelled as though lilacs and lilies were at its heart instead of oud wood.
It wasn’t just flowers – there was a wash of honeydew that appeared and vanished, and a ripe apricot that refused to leave until the very end, when the whole thing faded into a soft, powdery wood.
I had worn a lot of oud, but nothing came together quite like this. It was gentler than the wild berry madness you got in the best Borneos, yet somehow had all the lush fruit you hoped for. Only, there it was in a Cambodian accent, and that made it dangerous for me – because it was the sort of thing you kept reaching for.
