Oud SQ

For me, and for many veteran oudheads, this is the fragrance that pushed us into the oud abyss from which we never emerged.

This purple-hazed resinous blast of beauty, of oud blooming flowers and Malayu pollen thick in the air, that rosey slash mitti slash sinking nuggets of resin on fire bursting into a cloud of……… this. The smell of the Sultan’s own extravagant escapades; the world’s most opulent oud – from long ago – aged for long, long years.

I once swiped a veteran distiller in Thailand with Oud Sultani (2001). He smelled it and said – without me telling him anything about the oil – that “this is one of those rare, old Malaysians… the ones that smell like flowers.”

Oud SQ is Oud Sultani.… but draped in dark blue purple floral garb. A resinous floral fusion impossible to capture today. And to our best estimate, Oud SQ is at least a decade older than Oud Sultani, which was distilled exactly twenty years ago…

While Oud Sultani is the closet proxy I can compare this to, I haven’t smelled Malaysian oud like this other than from Sultan Qaboos’ own collection. There’s this piercing purple incense tenor that mystifies the most experienced nose. Intoxicates it. It’s like I’ve discovered oud all over again and can’t get enough.

As I explain in detail with Mélange Royale, the reason Oud SQ is unlike any other Malaysian oud you’ll ever smell is because Sultan Qaboos was so mad about oud that he had his own distillery – in Oman.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Oud SQ was distilled using Hojari river water. Whatever he did, the Sultan was very particular about the kinds of smells he wanted.

The fact that this is immediately apparent in the general profile of the oils in his personal collections, tells you that he didn’t just go through all the effort to bring in the craziest Malaysian harvests of the century to his palace, but that he had a tailored distillation set-up to get the best out of those sinkers. One whiff of Oud SQ is all it takes to prove it…

Still, I’d bet that even if you get your hands on the best Malaysian agarwood you can find today and distill it in the Sultan’s own distillery the same way Oud SQ was distilled – you’d get a different smell…

You can take two batches of agarwood from two adjacent farms and juice them in the same pots and they’d smell different. The earth, the ants in that earth, and every small change to the ecosystem impacts the way oud smells. Aquilarias grown alongside rubber and palm trees, with pineapples growing out between them all – all to maximize square meterage – how does that compare to a massive giant growing solo, its roots free to dig deep into the earth?

And I don’t need to remind anyone how dramatically the ecosystem has changed in the past half century! So, nobody could, not for love or money, capture this scent again. We can mimic it, catch glimpses of it – but never get it like you get it here.

So, acquire a bottle and share in this incredible legacy. Take a whiff and adorn yourself with the finest oud ever distilled – courtesy of an actual Sultan who spent lavishly to make it possible.

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