Malinau 3000

If you asked an oud connoisseur back in the 1990s about the Holy Grail of oud oils, they would have probably talked about Assam followed by Koh Kong.

Ask an oud lover from the early 2000s and into the 2010s about the apex of the oud oil experience, and Malinau would probably top the charts, replacing even those renowned agarwood Meccas.

To understand Pursat & Nha Trang, you need to be an agarwood academic with a least a BA thesis on agarwood under your belt.

But Malinau is directly appealing to everyone, just like the scent of rose or jasmine. You don’t need to be an adept or initiate of some secret Osmothèque to understand Malinau. It’s gorgeous – like gardenias are gorgeous.

With the lack of cultivation efforts and the announcement of Indonesia’s capital moving to Borneo, it’s harder now to find quality Malinau materials than it is to find Myitkyina or Vietnam. (The Smithsonian already reported how “Borneo has lost 30% of its forest in the past 40 years, falling at twice the rate as the rest of the world’s rainforests” back in 2014.)

Ask me for a Vietnamese or Myanmar oil, and I can arrange a distillation after a few phone calls. Ask me for a Malinau, and I’ll say, “better luck next time.”

There’s no cultivation in Malinau and no plantation materials like in Myanmar and Vietnam where you find agarwood even at the airport (watch RIP Vietnam Agarwood and Wild or Cultivated Agarwood? for more on this). So, whatever oil you come across that’s a true Malinau is more than likely wild.

Still, the microcarpas distilled in this bottle weren’t discovered yesterday. What you have here is olde wilde harvests sourced via the Chinese bosses, done as a favor for yours truly, meticulously cooked in Taiwan.

It’s old stock agarwood like this distilled at the hands of my kyara Sifu that makes the fragrance pop with the scent of ginseng injected with iris liqueur under a buttery vanilla raspberry veneer, all smelled in a single whiff that blows your head off. Grateful that the smell exists at all, you still shout at the fact that you can’t repeat the distillation.

You can probably count the number of artisanal Malinaus released over the past few years on one hand. Russian Adam basically gave up after the cost of quality Malinau wood doubled, tripled, then quadrupled a few years ago, if and when you found any.

There’s a reason the few Malinau oils I’ve offered in recent times were already aged…

If you have’t yet discovered what makes artisanal Malinaus the apex of the oud experience for so many old-timers—or you’re an old-timer who’s been waiting for Godot…… let your nose feast on this ginseng-orris-dry lush berry paradox that steals the beauty of the original Borneo 3000’s vanillic sweetness and wraps it in a cloud of heated microcarpa exuding this powdery kinamic chord you smell when your nose is dangerously close to your burner’s coil yet you can’t get enough of the sumptuous sips of Malinau you were sure no longer existed.