Port Moresby

There are ouds that are little more than dreams. What-if distillations you wish existed. An Oriscent-style New Guinea… just imagine!

For many this would be the Holy Grail of oud: To blue-green waves of filarian incense crash onto a shore and kick up kinam dust into the air. 

They are dreams because of what it takes to unearth such fragrances. Most ouds are distilled on-site, in their country of origin, while the rare escapades to the contrary involve a kilo or two of wood sent to someone with a pot in their backyard – distilled abroad for logistics’ sake.

It’s another mission altogether to locate a super rare incense-grade harvest in the heart of New Guinea and then jump through hoops to get that harvest to Taiwan. Not because you happen to have a pot there, but because it allows you to coax an otherworldly aroma that would be impossible to replicate elsewhere. 

On all accounts, it’s a logistical nightmare; a mission undertaken purely for the love of oud against all rationale other than to realize an olfactory dream and create a historic masterpiece.

It takes months. If you count building connections and waiting for a suitable high-grade New Guinea harvest – it takes years.

With my favorite Papuan aborigine. Just scored some super Nabire wood from Wapoga Village!
 

As with other Oriscent ouds, Port Moresby focuses on the theme of narcotic kinam smoke. It takes the gargantuan scent of mighty New Guinea agarwood and bottles its aquatic blue kinamic resin.

From first sniff to the last flicker of it on your skin the next day, Port Moresby gives off its resinous island blue. There is no development. Just pure radiance. Dancing stillness. No great first note that then becomes another thing and then something else. Just pure kyara-blue, like the smoke; one single note.

If you meditate, in Moresby you have pure liquid Zen for your special moments of enlightenment. If you don’t meditate, you can’t help but drift into a introspective daze amazed that such a smell has graced our olfactory realm.

The soul thirsts for Moresby like it does for no other oud. There is a narcotic quality to this oil; it smells intoxicating, but not only in a figurative way. You keep craving the scent more and more, and you find yourself sniffing the place you swiped it on your skin, then the fingers you untwisted the cap with, to inhale its traces on your skin. The entire psyche finds a comfort and a satisfaction in Moresby which I’m at a loss to compare to another oil.

Sedative—like effulgent blue agar ether injected with the sweetness of fossilized amber laced with Melissa.

A hint of green, yes. Earthy, too. But it’s the earthy herbaceous NG oud incense  profile that makes this the most unique distillation from the line-up offered today. Easily one of the most precious ouds we’ve ever distilled.

Imagine the piercing, cooling tone of kinam… but without that medicinal, gently bitter bite. If you could extract the balmy sweetness of amber and diffuse it through the vapor of green kinam incense sticks, you’d still have to wonder where this sedative blue glaze comes from, and just how ethereal—beautiful—it smells. 

This insanity we had to go through to make this happen combined with the rarity of the agarwood itself that is both difficult to obtain (no matter how well connected you are) and expensive if you could get your hands on any – all of it means this is not a mission we plan to repeat. Port Moresby holds a dear place in oud history, and an irreplaceable spot in the most formidable oud collection.  

*This is the same oud contained in Kinamantan. It’s the oud that gives the perfume its piercing kinamic quality. A pristine incense note that shoots out through the top notes and winds down to a resinous zen in the drydown.