Oud & Bergamot opened the Cologne Intense collection at Jo Malone London in 2010, four fragrances entrusted to Christine Nagel and aimed first at the Gulf markets. The house declares only three notes: bergamot, cedar, oud. Chant Wagner, for her part, smells mostly ambergris and orange, and judges that Nagel tamed the oud until she stripped it of its animal side.
Chant Wagner goes looking for the oud and finds ambergris: she holds Oud & Bergamot to be an oud tamed into abstraction, very elegant, and badly named.
Olfastory’s review
The only signed review found on this fragrance is Chant Wagner's, published by The Scented Salamander on 3 December 2014, four years after the release. She does not comment on it, she disputes it, and on its very name.
What she smells first is neither the oud nor the bergamot, but a skin note that evokes ambergris, and behind it an orange. She goes so far as to check the silver label on the bottle, wondering whether the house had not sent her an Ambergris & Orange still to come. The kinship that strikes her is that of Eau des Merveilles by Hermès, and, further on, of Elixir des Merveilles — where the name had promised something more like a Shalimar rewritten as an oriental.
The oud, she writes, is elusive. A camphoraceous nuance passes, furtive; the ambergris takes over again, with shades of a fish market where powdery goods dry under the nets. She ends up finding it, at the cost of a tasting trick she keeps to herself, and only then does the announced accord hold: a discreet oud, inflections of orange, before the ambergris carries the day once more.
Her judgement bears on the method more than on the result. Nagel has said she likes to tame her materials; here, says Wagner, she tamed too much, and the oud lost its animal nature — a pinned butterfly keeps its beauty but is no longer alive. The verdict stays favourable all the same, and that is what makes the review interesting: the thing smells very good, it has a nonchalant, Parisian elegance, and it holds to the wager of an abstract oud that owes nothing to fashion. She ends on an image — an oud mousse, where others serve a pudding. Anyone wanting raw smoke will have to look elsewhere.