Koribbean

East meets West Indies.

Bokbunja, the South Korean black raspberry wine, blended with a Caribbean rum. Two deep-rooted staples, Korean and Caribbean, and a fun, imaginative and novel spin on east meets west.

Dominican sugarcane and a Jamaican ortanique, the natural orange-tangerine hybrid. A Korean blackberry and plum with them. Ghanaian dark chocolate and tobacco leaf sit under the two drinks, and the blend is smooth, aged and balanced, velvet-like, booze and fruit together.

Matteo Parfums is the work of Matthew J. Sánchez, a Southern California native, son of a Mexican-Sicilian father and a Ghanaian-American mother. Sánchez studied applied mathematics and chemistry at UCLA, then spent three and a half years in fragrance and chemistry research before founding the house in Los Angeles in 2017. Every release fuses cultures and concepts: a Korean wine with a Caribbean rum, Chinoiserie, a contemporary imagining of the Aztec, a horchata turned into an amber accord and made in-house.

The work is whimsical and imaginative, and the fragrances are hand bottled and formulated in California. The debut and its two flankers are formulated on the founder's own family heritage, with Latin, Mediterranean and African materials. The rest of the line reaches further, to Korea and the Caribbean, to China and Europe, to ancient Maya and Aztec, distant geographies with shared histories, each release its own fusion.