Velature

A small jasmine flower in a vase, on a luthier's workbench.

The carpenter keeps a vigil after the lights go out, working by lamp to finish before dawn. Planks of seasoned wood wait in the room, boards that will take perfectly applied glazes and become a soundboard.

Wild Padang and Merauke oud intensify the wood and make the foundation. Thai Prachin at times enhances a warm, enveloping, spicy-woody quality, and at times brings forward the wild, animalic facet of the jasmine. Oud protects and lends a regal quality, and the blend becomes almost a talisman. Chinese sambac is slightly green and citrusy, Italian jasmine from Gerace intense and truly luminous, auriculatum roaring and indolic and a little graceless with it. The jasmine comes out vivid. Six woods together run from lightly smoky to resinous to the smell of wood drying slowly.

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.