Oud Sulaiman III

‘This is the best oil I’ve ever distilled for you,’ he said. He’d just arrived from Assam, with a small suitcase in which he’d carefully stored two ten-tola tin canisters.

‘Even better than Oud Sulaiman?’

‘No doubt.’

‘I don’t think so…’

‘This is what the really old, old oils used to be like. We have not seen oil like this in years,’ he insisted.

The oil was too precious to be shipped, and he’d felt compelled to personally fly out from Assam and hand-deliver the oil to me in Jordan.

I’d turned his entire operation upside-down with the demands I made, and he faced major disputes with his brother over the whole collaboration.

The oil we were smelling that autumn afternoon was mysteriously different to the usual smooth and creamy barnyard you get if you just use higher quality raw materials than normal. There was a softness, a powderiness and an altogether different character to it. Deep down that bottomless goodness lay blood orange zest, musk, ancient woods, civet, animalic elixirs from other eons.

It had the feralness of my then highly controversial Chinese Exclusive Oud, but it was just so much profounder, vaster, larger… It was as unique a profile as Oud Khidr, Oud Nuh and Assam Kinam.

The difference was due to this wood being acquired in Nagaland, along the Burmese agarwood route. Most Burmese trees get exported to Assam, where they command higher prices than in Myanmar.

Contemporary distillations of Burmese raw materials are radically different to the profile of Sulaiman III. It is as if you are comparing ouds from different centuries. There is none of the feral character, the depth, or the ancient spirit of Sulaiman to be had in our present day distillations of Nagaland, Assam, or Myanmar agarwood.

We thought it was due to the ‘new’ distillation techniques that the oils were more on the floral-candied side than what the old legends used to smell like. But alas, we revisited the timeless Indian distillation methods in a few subsequent batches, and didn’t get anything even remotely resembling Sulaiman and his brethren.

In Oud Sulaiman III you have Oud. Oud as it was known a hundred years ago, five hundred years ago, even a thousand years ago.

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