If you ever wished you had a Time Machine to go back to the days when Oud Royale I was selling for a fifth of the price, your wish has just been granted.
Hailing from Sumatra, Oud Royale 1985 is one of the very first harvests of Sumatran agarwood to be distilled into oil (in many parts of Indonesia, distillation only began to take off in the early ‘90s). So, just imagine the kind of agarwood that was used to craft this oil!
Imagine only centennial mother trees available everywhere you turned in the jungle…. No China Market to send the wood off to…. Back in 1985, oud oil commanded considerably higher prices than raw agarwood. This is why oils from the early ‘80s are the best, most fragrant smelling specimens of pure oud you can possibly lay your hands on.
I remember the biggest agarwood tycoon in Southeast Asia giving a sigh when he recalled the tons upon tons of precious Malaysian tigerwood that he and his brother ground up into dust and put into the boilers. ‘Back then, the oil was expensive,’ he said. ‘But not the wood.’
Take the fact that the Indonesian jungle was just beginning to get explored back then, combine it with a weak wood market and what do you get? The absolute richest, most opulent oud oils that were ever distilled. Among them my Oud Royale I, which by universal consensus is the most famous and highly coveted oud oil ever distilled.
It’s no secret that just about every big oud brand employs force-aging techniques to imbue their ouds with the ‘old smell’. Of course, these kind of ouds haven’t actually been aged and the scent is simply a vague echo of that deep, genuine vintage smell you only get in oud that’s been maturing for many years.
There’s no mimicking maturity. Ouds can be settled and cured, but that’s merely when the aging game begins. And can you guess what 30 years aging does to fine Indonesian oud?
What should you do with a bottle of Oud Royale 1985? When your oud crave gets the better of you, take out the applicator stick, inhale deeply, then plug it back. On the rarest occasion, take an actual swipe. A tiny drop. Where on earth will you find oud like this again?
This is one of those rare opportunities to own something absolutely pristine, ancient, from a different era completely. An oud that’s older than many distillers today – just think of that for a moment!
The scent? There’s a sparkling note of vintage agarwoody liqueur that just takes your mind away…. a note that oils like Oud Sultani, Kambodi 1976 and Oud Royale 1982 all share: The scent of the finest specimen of oud from any given jungle, aged – for a long, long time. A granddaddy charisma that shows you the true meaning of ‘oudy’ like no oil distilled today can.
For one, there was absolutely NO fractionation at play in the extraction of Royale 1985. No ‘latest technique’ that somehow ingeniously managed to get the immortal scent of black thickly resined gaharu out of half-decayed chips.
Here, you have the blackest raw materials harvested from centennial mother trees wantonly thrown into the boilers, and then the resulting elixir aged for thirty years. Our distiller didn’t have a crystal ball to tell him this wood would be worth thousands per kilogram somewhere down the line. So he did the best that he could for the time he was in, which was to cook the absolute best oil. That was his luck, and this is now your luck.
Most people with the faintest business sense will see a rare opportunity in this oil. The oud and the scent and everything else aside, Royale 1985 presents an investment opportunity like no other.
Think of the lucky few who had the foresight to buy multiple bottles of Oud Royale I a decade ago, and stash them in a safe deposit box. The returns they reaped just a few years down the line were something no investment banker could even get his head around, and no stock market could ever match.
So why don’t I do it myself? This is something that I’ve thought about long and hard.
In deciding to launch Royale 1985, I had to go back to square one, when I set out to found this market over a decade ago, and my role was to educate more so than to sell or to profit. I had to teach the world, among other things, that oud oil and Montale were completely different things. We started from zero….
I find that the market I strove to create has become rife with all sorts of nonsense that is being peddled as the latest ‘cutting edge’ distillation genius. Where oils distilled last month are being marketed as more ‘aged’ than oils distilled a decade ago. And the unsuspecting enthusiast is listening.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d put the same sort of effort that I invested in agarwood into something completely different, like sandalwood…. Would we have an equally competitive sandalwood craze in the West now, with every designer brand boasting their own unique ‘sandalwood’ flavor the way they do oud? Would the sandalwood essential oil market be as cutthroat, as rife with rivalry, jealousy, and sheer lies as our little agarwood oil market has become?
It is because I live with such questions from day to day that I have decided to bid Oud Royale 1985 a tight farewell, and hand him over to you, my loyal customers and fellow oud lovers for safekeeping. More than oud oil, what I aim to give you here is information. Something for you to take and sniff the same way you’d take a book and read what it has to say to you.
Bottled agarwood liqueur, aged for thirty years, doesn’t get cooked in copper or steel. It’s crafted by a golden clock. Oud Royale I sold for $550 nine years ago. The last bottle I know of that sold went for $10,000. Take any investment, rare assets in particular, and just think of the annual lost interest, not to mention currency devaluation, drastic drops in worldwide supply, and the sheer worth of time that any merchant takes into account when finally selling, and you can clearly see that offering this oil at 2007 pricing is not me cashing in.
Oud Royale 1985 is nothing short of a gift, from me to you.