NHA TRANG LTD
Cambodia’s got Koh Kong and Laos has Pusong, but there’s no place in the oud world more cherished than Nha Trang. I don’t know of oud more sought-after than oud from this small coastal strip renowned for dishing up the most expensive kyara on the planet.
Vietnamese hunters get arrested across the Far East in hopes of finding what they once found locally. Trek into the most virgin jungles in Borneo and 9/10 times you’ll find an abandoned camp left by Vietnamese poachers.
That’s because Nha Trang is the Mecca of Kyara and jungles were tapped early on and now the gold rush has long since passed. Most we’re left with is NT fame, the legend it left behind, and the strips of vintage kinam sold in private backrooms across China and Japan. You basically only get cultivated trees growing there now, the odd batch of unearthed wild wood, and plenty of
Malaysian imports to trick folks into buying the ‘latest harvest’.
But despite the fame, there’s a story to Nha Trang that has hardly been told…
Between the kinam and the wild harvests that ended up with collectors of rare agarwood over the years, nobody ever had the spunk to actually make
oil from those harvests –
any of them. The reason it’s hard to find any high-grade Nha Trang wood is because few even think of selling theirs…… If that’s how they feel about the
wood, imagine how they’d feel about Nha Trang
oil, which is a gazillion times rarer than any batch of insanely good wood from NT.
But in making Nha Trang LTD, you’re not after just any batch and you’re not just talking about centennial mother-trees harvested back in the heydays either. If you can track down
any kind of high-grade Nha Trang oil, count yourself lucky. Unearth a bottle of
incense-grade Nha Trang oud and you’ve struck gold.
But who distills ancient incense-grade Nha Trang wood? Certainly nobody would even think about distilling the sinking stuff which on the wood market fetches
the highest prices. Today, you’re looking at what used to be kinam prices for proper incense grade Nha Trang.
Nha Trang LTD isn’t just a pure incense-grade distillation. 25% of the wood that went into its making was sinking-grade.
That you’ve got the chance to get your hands on oud like this should make you cry. Not just because it’s incense-grade Nha Trang, sinking and next to impossible to imagine it ever being produced.
Nha Trang agarwood is so revered because its profile is
distinctly kinamic. In fact, incense-grade Nha Trang could get traded as kinam because it smells so similar. Hard as it is to find and expensive as it is to buy, distill a good batch of
pure incense-grade Nha Trang wood today and you’re almost guaranteed to get a whiff of kinam in there. Distill the mother trees that grew right next to the kyara trees – often
containing kyara themselves – and you’ve got oud from an era of agarwood that’s the stuff of legend. We’re not talking about a
hint of kinam anymore. You ARE smelling kinam; the very DNA that permeates this famed East Vietnamese jungle.
Now, add the
sinking-grade black incense strips and you’ve just catapulted into a different dimension. Here, the kyara profile is even more acute and much smoother (lesser grades will give you a cruder twangy hue of it). Think of it this way: high-end Nha Trang oud oil is you burning a shaving of kyara at a slightly higher temp than the Kōdō masters would have you do. Nha Trang LTD puts the sliver at the perfect ultra low temp to reveal kinam’s succulent finesse as it fuses its trademark bitterness with a creamy
come-hither! that makes for a single note that’s just ‘OMG!’
The scent is voluptuous because it’s just straight up Beautiful. I don’t mean floral (which many people confuse with aromatic beauty). I mean a primal scent that moves you;
awes you. A scent that’s as unique to this legendary province as Hainan is to China.
Don’t expect a bombardment of different scent notes. This oil is pristinely linear and lets you look out onto an olfactory field where you’re struck with immediate beauty and perfection, not counting how many different kinds of flowers grow there or how high the hills are. A single tune of awe that reverberates into the drydown.
I’m not gonna go into the distillation details. Suffice to say you can’t just throw a bag of sinking Nha Trang agarwood into the boiler like that. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one way to distill such nose-numbingly good agarwood and that’s the classic Oriscent way. The process takes long and costs a fortune (we’ve still got over $250K to go in paying it off) but it’s the only way to get you a bottle of Nha Trang LTD.
Forget about Oud Royale 1. If there’s one oud I’d want to be remembered for, it’s this one. If there’s just one oud you could ever experience, let it be a swipe of Nha Trang LTD. Gun to my head, if I had to give it all up and choose just one oud to keep for the rest of my days,
it’d have to be Nha Trang LTD.
Vietnamese oud doesn’t –
cannot – get better than this. Numerous people can quote me saying, “This is the most beautiful oud I’ve ever smelled” pretty much every time I take a swipe of it. So, if you’ve been chasing the rainbow of Vietnamese agarwood, stop.
This is the one.
Smelling this calibre oud will probably do to you what it did to me: render just about every other kind of oud irrelevant. A scent so primal, so sensual it casts a shadow over everything else and it’s as if you’re smelling oud for the first time.
Then something magical happens. After getting lost in it and you finally do take a swipe of another oud, it hits you just how truly it enhances your appreciation of
all ouds. You’ll look with new eyes at even something as different as a Maroke. But the most dramatic duet is with Chinese oud. Smell this and smell quality Chinese oud on your other wrist and it’s like you’re spiraling down a path that ends up with you in an olfactory asylum, bats in the belfry and wishing for more.
That’s Nha Trang for you.
Price: $4,500 / 3gr.
On sale for a limited time only.