Eau du Sud (1995)
by Annick Goutal

My first Goutal scent and its a winner. I went with this based on the reviews online. Starts with a strong citrus opening for sure. Lime, grapefruit and verbena right off the bat with a great combination of citrus notes. The floral notes come rather quickly for me and the scent softens and drys down to a nice even skin scent. Good spring / summer scent for sure and easy to wear to the office. Enjoy.

I broadly agree with AlHamr and Bal a Versailles' comments below.

Its no surprise that a modern Nose should draw inspiration from Eau Sauvage and go on to produce something resembling a streamlined reworking of Roudnitska's reference cologne-as-chypre composition.

Eau du Sud cuts the fibrous textured iris - floral heart right back and promotes, with lime, the juiciness of the citrus notes in its place, thereby revealing the desiccated woody bones of the structure at the same time. It's as though Annick Goutal took Eau Sauvage and exposed it to the harsh sun and winds of the Mediterranean garrigue until only the arid essentials were left, and then she juiced it up with lime - giving a skeletal lime scented version of Eau Sauvage.

It's also a decent woody citrus in its own right; which when stripped of the original's rather stuffy floral baggage becomes less grand but more at home in todays climate of skin and bone masculines.

***

In the opening, the most prominent note is lemon verbena, along with a non-tart grapefruit & minty herbs. After half an hour, this accord is joined by an impression of soft florals. From here, it slowly dries down to a base of crisp moss, with a faintly smoky edge, & still-detectable citrus notes. The projection is quite soft, & three hours in it fades to a skin scent, barely there after eight hours.
This is not a tenacious fragrance, but it is evocative of a thousand memories for me, conjuring as it does a Mediterranean hillside in the heat of summer, complete with the screech of cicadas filling the olive groves. For this reason, I cannot help but love it.

For some reason I haven't posted a review on this absolute mainstay of my collection.
Short and sweet. Eau du Sud, to me, is very similar to Eau Savage, which I have always loved on my husband. Unlike me he doesn't keep an arsenal of fragrances and so I don't step on his toes and wear one of 'his' signatures. I can wear Eau du Sud instead.
Other reviewers note a similarity to Cristalle in Eau du Sud. Cristalle delivers a more 'juicy fruit' honeysuckle intensity but I do understand the reference. Eau du Sud carries its own representation of summer in a bottle, there's a light tennis cake and a long glass of iced Pimms nearby. Eight hours after application Eau du Sud releases an aroma of those Fishermen's Lozenges, smoky and camphoreous, as if it were its dying breath.
Always quirky. I like that.

Genre: Citrus

Eau du Sud is a beautifully, truthfully rendered lemon-centered fragrance with a bracing herbal component that lifts it beyond the horde of limp, "fresh" scents that crowd the nasal passages these days. The heart accord is very well blended and not overly sweet. The only note that really sticks out to my nose is basil, which does send me some culinary signals. Not enough to make me want to chew on myself, however. Very pretty, clearly unisex, and extremely well executed. Not the kind of fragrance that I get excited about, but I do have to ackowledge its quality.

As an aside, I find Eau du Sud far more interesting than Goutal's more popular (and overrated?) Eau d'Hadrien.