Canelo Negro

Canelo Negro begins with a Mapuche ritual.

Its central note, Chilean cinnamon — drimys winteri, the tree the Mapuche call canelo — is sacred: the cosmic axis, the point where the compass converges and the upper and lower worlds meet. Distiller Matías Abreu builds the fragrance around it, joining the bark and leaf to three more ingredients drawn from Latin American shamanic tradition: mapacho tobacco from the Amazon, guayaco resin from the Chaco, and carobá wood from Uruguay.

Smoke runs through the whole composition. Cade, the tar pulled from juniper stumps, stands in for fire and ritual. Labdanum and Palo Santo carry the resinous weight; black cinnamon turns primitive and sensual against them; ash from sacred smoke settles over everything else, indecipherable, unlike anything that's come before it.

Joel L. Martínez grew up in Arica, or almost Peru, as the founder insists, among herb markets, Aymara elders, olive groves and desert beaches. Training came in Europe. The house says the real mastery came later, from distilling and foraging in the Andes. The method is to burn what was learned, mixing what Europe taught with shamanic teaching and yerbatero ritual, technical data sheets with Aymara grandmothers' recipes.

The name comes from a myth about 432 hertz, a frequency where the universe, the plant kingdom and human rhythm are said to converge. 432 researches, distills and bottles at the pace of the seasons, and each batch differs from the one before it, made from other plants that lived through other storms and droughts. Releases are handcrafted in small batches, with batch numbers and an artisan signature. Five of the seven Mestizos have been released.