A perfumer's guilty pleasure, oud oil, also known as agarwood essential oil, is without a doubt the most refined olfactory merchandise available anywhere. Agarwood is the most precious aromatic substance on earth. The distillation of oud oil has become an art form in its own right...

There's a world of difference between the various grades of aloeswood. The cheapest oud oil is distilled from aloeswood that costs as little as $20 a kilogram, while the finest oud was distilled from wood that today has a starting price of $50,000 per kilogram...

Indigenous cultures and modern minds alike swear to the sacred nature of the mysterious agarwood tree. Oud has a place in the homes of laymen to business tycoons, whether as carved agarwood beads, aloeswood miniatures of religious symbols, or bottles of fragrant oud oil....

The key distinction between Ensar Oud™ and designer agarwood fragrances is that our oud is completely organic. The perfume industry synthesizes and reproduces a so-called 'agarwood' scent which is almost entirely synthetic, rarely containing any genuine, natural agarwood extract. It smells the same all the time...

Following Trygve Harris’ latest escapades through Laos, some confusion has come up about the real state of agarwood.  From some corners you’re being told agarwood is all but extinct, only to then hear that there’s in reality a surplus supply. So, what’s the deal?

With an understanding of this almost sacrificial ceremony through which oud oil is brought into existence, we should carefully consider how we conduct ourselves when harvesting this sacred tree. We believe that the spirit of the oil can only be captured when the tree is treated with due respect...

Products get sold at a markdown when they exchange hands; works of art get sold at a profit. That is the core difference between what you get from Ensar Oud and what you find elsewhere.

There are places running deep into the heart of Borneo island where natives live as they have for centuries. Here, you can still track down a tree or two. ‘If the natives find one they cut it immediately and sell it off to the first taker,’ a veteran wood broker who’s been in the agarwood business like his father, and grandfather before him, told me.

If your bottle happened to be one of the dosens not accurately able to contain 3ml (instead only 2.7ml or 2.5ml), then you're not just 'getting a little less'. The difference is considerable – the difference costing you $50, $70, $90, $130, or even more. Suppose you're about to invest in a bottle of oud at, say...

Just as musk is for the 'big houses' of French perfumery, so is 'oud' for the big Arabian houses – a type of smell – regardless of what substance is used to give off or emit that smell. Nowhere do they advertise that they are selling 'agarwood essential oil'...

I contracted my oud crave back in 2004, when I started attending the mystical gatherings of the Sufis. They'd always have these little stalls at the "bazaar" section, where all sorts of Sufi goods would be on offer, among them little greasy vials of oil called 'oud'...

Deer musk used to arrive in caravans from Kashmir to Mecca in droves. Now the musk deer is an endangered species, and most people in the world have not, and never will smell real deer musk. Likewise, Solomon's centuries-old celebrated 'oud of the Bible' is no more...

I was calling him to arrange a visit to his distillery and see whether we couldn't cooperate on an upcoming Artisanal Laotian oil for Ensar Oud™, which I’d dreamt of for years, yet simply never managed to get around to. And he basically told me my trip would have been futile...

'There's nothing left, this is the end … we’re keeping these for later years,' our friend remarked as he showed us his partners' agarwood collection. He was flying out to Papua the next morning to meet the only person he still deals with in the region, to pick up the last of what he had...

'If you want oud oil, all I have to do is make a phone call. I can get you two kilos in two minutes. But you know what kind of oud it’ll be...' explained the man who first set up distillation inKuala Lumpur, as he showed us around his distillery.

We don't deal with middlemen, so there's no value added to what we pay for oud wood. The same cannot be said of other vendors who, without exception, have to deal with second, third, or fourth parties. By the time the wood (or oil extracted from it) ends up on the market, the price has gone through several mark-ups along the way.

Last I witnessed (2007), ‘Combodi Qadeem’ was a mix of Indian, Thai and Papuan Ouds, according to a fortuitous inspiration of ‘the Boss’ one day. So then, to return to our question, what on earth is ‘Oud Cambodi’?

In effect, what we’re doing is to buy 2,000 ten-gram packets from Baiedo’s premium agarwood incense range and then instead of pulling out the burner, we're dumping them into the boiler. Which is, according to everybody in the oud producing world you will ever meet, nothing short of insanity.

Agarwood collectors across Cambodia started to cash in on their stowed away stashes when the Chinese market started to boom. Some of them began clearing their display cabinets four to six years ago, while others only decided to give in since a year ago...

This oud is in a class all its own as an uncanny aromatic comparable to the rarest floral extracts used in high class perfumery. Smelling this oil fills one with wonder and regret about all the other ouds that could've been done this way and just weren't, out of sheer carelessness...

Tireless collaborations with distillers of every kind has seen the rise of a collective of the most talented and distinguished producers the oud world has ever known, juicing up the most insane oud oils available anywhere. Combine his visionary method with...