CAMBODI DELIGHT - An Interesting Smooth Wild Oud Oil from Cambodia

The opening is a little symphony of notes : apple, leather (suede), cinammon, nutmeg, peat, sweet pipe tobacco, molasses. After a while. 30 minutes or so, it goes through an herbal phase, showing new bitter and wild mint notes.

If you are not familiar with ouds (or with Italian aperitivos) one could project pejorative bitterness with them, but it is just one feature, frequent in good ouds which, dances with herbal, spicy and balsamic notes in harmony.

.One hour in, it gets quite sweeter again with honey, tobacco, minty freshness and from there goes on showing a nice gentle evolution, with interesting transformation of alternating and returning notes (eg: spices, suede,) with the occasional new ones appearing, like sweet woordruff /coumarin after a four hours or so, some florals (rose) an hour later or even tangerine in the later dried down (I noticed it the first time after 10 hours)

 This oil is truly an interesting and quality oil (wild wood, well distilled, showing a rich olfactive evolution overtime), but the distiller was transparent about the fact that there was some white wood in the raw material used for distillation. This means wood coming from the same tree but very low on resin. White wood is customarily integrated in distillation practices by many if not most distillers, as it does produce additional oil... but it also dilutes the experience a bit (the oil from such wood being different). Highest quality oils of course do not use any, only incense grade... but they are also much costlier. .

As a consequence, the profile is not a powerhouse and the longevity is medium / good but not exceptional. It is nevertheless a quality and interesting oil, available at a much lower price than an oil made with wild wood of similar quality, with the additional work totally filtering out from the raw material all that is not incense grade, and the lower yield it would generate.

The nature of the profile makes it a smooth social wear in contexts where oud is less known. Also the evolution and even the dry down are anything but boring and keep adding occasional surprising notes (the sweet woodruff or rose notes appearing after 4-5 hours of wear and the tangerine after double of that), the dry down is globally sweet but with nuances and diversity, harmonized with spicy, herbal, floral and fruity notes.