Arcimboldo

Roses from the garden hang heavy in the air, tangled up with the smoke.

The basket lands before anyone else: aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, and the tougher ones wrapped in foil and dropped into the embers like small meteorites. Then the grill turns into a canvas, embers for a palette, vegetables going on as thick strokes of paint, and something shifts four centuries backwards, to the man who studied plants and flowers one leaf at a time and put them back together as faces.

Rosa Cymosa is invigorating, warm, spicy and festive, distinctly of fruit compote. Heritage tomato brings sweetness and a subtle salinity, roasted red pepper hints of smoked paprika and the grill. Wild artichoke runs earthy and bitter, almost chamomile-like. Nepetella, made into a wild balsamic sauce, cuts through the sweetness of the char.

All natural, so the colour can shift and a sediment can form. Use a little: it may stain light or delicate fabrics.

Zanini is two friends, Giacomo and Filippo, who worked side by side in an office for years before starting something else in 2023. The idea arrived in a car on the road from Prato to Basel, when Filippo mentioned in passing a decade spent making smellscapes: fragrances built out of the sensations of places both real and invented. Bureaucracy, small budgets and renovations followed, and the project took shape.

Everything is 100% natural, with no synthetic material anywhere. Most of the harvesting and processing is done by hand, by traditional methods, and they respect nature's timing, the right moment to pick and then months for extraction and maturation. Production is limited to under a thousand units a year, every bottle handmade and numbered, released as exclusive limited-edition projects, each with its own story.