Reviews of Baume au Doge (2008)
by Eau d'Italie

Imagine the kind of dry, austere, smoky incense-and-cardamom accord that Bertrand Duchaufour presents in Dzongkha laid over a rich, bittersweet vanilla gourmand base, and you might come up with something like Baume du Doge. The juxtaposition of sweet and dry, stony and edible is novel to the point of shocking, though in an gratifying manner.

Within a few minutes of application, a minty/camphoraceous note wells up from the gourmand base, and somehow manages to stitch the two opposing olfactory blocks together. (Since there is nothing even remotely minty listed in Baume du Doge’s pyramid, I attribute my impression to an odd synergy between the herbal fennel and the crisp quality of clove.) At this point in the development I’m reminded of Lorenzo Villoresi’s Piper Nigrum, which also uses mint in a sweet oriental context, but Baume du Doge displays a smoother and more fully integrated structure. Where the opening of Piper Nigrum can come off as jangling or cacophonous, this new scent is suave and articulate. Baume du Doge also dries down crisp, woody, and slightly sweet, which is a far cry from Piper Nigrum’s powdery vanillic-amber exit. It is tenacious, with moderate sillage and projection, and it strikes me as relatively gender neutral – leaning perhaps slightly toward the masculine.

To the best of my knowledge, a gourmand woody oriental represents new territory for Duchaufour, and I believe he navigates it quite adroitly. I may be in a minority of one in finding Duchaufour’s recent excursion into peppery aquatic florals in the guise of Magnolia Romana more interesting than Baume du Doge, but I can heartily recommend this new scent to anyone who enjoys a spicy oriental.