Sweetest Assassin

The year the Widow Clicquot changed Champagne, the Great Comet was seen for over 260 days.

Many took the comet as an omen. A time of illness, war and uncertainty, when many did not know how long they would live. They would drink the sweet bubbles of Champagne until the sun rose, and in that glass they could recapture all that was lost, forget their grief and the mundane disappointments of life, and for just a moment drink the stars.

What is in the bottle was made as a natural wine is made, with champagne techniques and principles: grown in California, aged sur lie for four years on French oak, and finished with a flower liqueur de tirage made using Chardonnay yeast from Small Vines TBH Vineyard in Sonoma. The mimosa flowers are extracted with champagne and champagne grapes. Flowers were picked in Venice over several seasons, the green comet of 2024 and the comet season of 2025 among them, and what is in the bottle was completed under the 3I/ATLAS comet.

Pomare's Stolen Perfume is the work of its founder, raised on a farm in the Northern Maine woods, with a mother's family from Tahiti. Spring on the farm meant the smell of thawing earth and spring grasses; the long winters meant fantasies of what Tahitian warmth would smell like. Most things in a bottle captured none of it the way it had been pictured, and so the founder found natural fragrance and began making tinctures and mixing oils and resins.

Working as a wine director and sommelier reinforced a passion for terroir, and the house celebrates regional and seasonal differences in natural ingredients, believing in small production with as little intervention as possible. Formulas pivot with the season, so one vintage differs from the last. The founder studied with the alchemist Mandy Aftel, and the house was named International Sustainable Brand of 2020 for its work with upcycled redwood.