Royal Guallam

There are oils that belong to Ensar Oud the company, and there are oils that belong to Ensar Oud the man. This falls in the second category.

To the Japanese masters, Guallam is a sacrosanct profile (we’re talking kyara country) and what you have here is one of the crowning jewels of my collection. This is Purple Kinam, without the ‘Purple’ – Kyara de Kalbar, without the ‘Kalbar’ – Kinam Rouge, without the ‘Rouge’ – the direct progeny of Kynam No 1 – pristine kinamic chords that echo loud and clear from head to base: A narcotic, bitter-spicy vibe that makes this oud the masterpiece of the Guallam Series, and one of the very greatest legends of Oriscent.

Royal Guallam is sunlight yellow, bitter kyara numbness, atop the most elegant woody profile to have ever been distilled by the son of man. There’s an elegance and a mindnumbing note that really hits the spot. A sensation that’s more pheromonal than the most sensual musk, more beautiful than the most delicate botanicals. That’s the quality of the wood that went into the boilers you smell, as well as the treatment of that wood in our signature Oriscent style, stripped of all experimentation and techniqueing.

When you craft Vietnamese agarwood à la Oriscent, you get the cleanest-pitched bitter-sweet kinam heart notes that act like head notes echoing from middle to top, lending a sort of dynamic depth and pull to the profile seldom experienced in contemporary oud production.

A suave spicy drydown that’s as ethereal as the airiest Borneo – without the ‘Borneo’. Age it for four years, and what do you get? You’ve got incense à la monkoh, where the goal was never to depart from the properties of the outrageously rare jinkoh that transmuted into drops of the most precious oud on Earth.

I kept the tin we originally poured it in at the distillery. Time and again, I’d return to the empty tin to take deep, insatiable breaths, taking in all of the myriad aromatic properties that is the cosmos of Royal Guallam.

If you’ve ever walked into a very high end perfume shop, where they try to combine the most precious natural extracts with things that are not quite as precious, you get a myriad spices, resins, flowers and botanicals coming at you all at once. All of that is contained in the single origin, wild incense grade Vietnamese sinensis oud oil that is Royal Guallam.

It smells like one note – the note of bitter medicinal Vietnamese agarwood – yet, that note contains within it an entire aromatic cosmos that is even more complex than Kinam Rouge. And no oud is more complex than Kinam Rouge!

We can’t go back in time four years or deflate the astronomical costs of wild Vietnamese agarwood. We can’t un-string the $50,000 bangles, un-carve the miniatures, or revive the jungles and resurrect the centennial grandmother trees. It takes all one’s effort and cleans out one’s bank account just to scrape together a few hundred grams of wild incense-grade wood here and there. So it’s not about how much the raw wood cost us. Give us a truck stuffed with cash today, and we can hardly find you that wood again…

Very soon, it’ll hit home that you can’t even put a price on this kind of oud. And you’ll realize that a bottle of Royal Guallam has suddenly become your most precious possession. If you hear about the legends all the time and wish you’d snagged one when they were available, here is your chance to go back and own one of the all-time greats.

Note: I’ve received inquiries about Royal Guallam asking if it bears any resemblance to Guallam Solide. It must be said they are completely different, and don’t bear any resemblance to one-another. The closest thing to Royal Guallam from previous releases would be Kynam No 1, but RG has its own unique shine, which is distinct and quite different to Kynam No 1’s. Royal Guallam was distilled from wood harvested in the legendary Nha Trang region of Vietnam, whereas Guallam Solide comprises of wood harvested throughout the country, as well as Laos.