Cambodia and I have history.
Many of you already know that although I reside in Malaysia, all my staff (up until recently) were Khmer thoroughbreds. From hunters to carvers (and let’s not forget Ahmad and Yusof, both Khmer Malaysians), I’ve always felt a certain affinity towards Cambodia, her people, and of course her agarwood. Its the oud country I’ve frequented the most, as my used up old passport and current passport will attest to.
As many of you may already know, I’m a rather overzealous preacher of dabbing oud instead of rubbing. Its always just ‘made sense’ to me… why would I want to rub it in, rendering it little more than a scented moisturizer?
If you read through the previous blog post, then you already know Agar Aura is in the agarwood hunting business no more. So what lies ahead for Agar Aura, for me?
A colleague of mine mentioned that many years ago his Chinese colleague, an agarwood sifu of the highest order, predicted 2016 to be the year of global extinction of wild agarwood.
In early 2016, I saw the very last ‘grandmother’-generation wild agarwood harvest in Malaysia.
When it comes to agarwood, you just can’t beat Vietnam.
Kyara… ’nuff said!
By now, anyone who knows anything about anything about oud, knows that the jungles across the oud-producing world are in trouble because of agarwood poachers. And at the top of the list of culprits are.. none other than Vietnamese hunters.
So what’s the situation in Vietnam right now? Having spent some time there just recently (cooking some lovely oils), I got to meet some of the heavy hitters, and I got to learn some new things which I myself was oblivious to before.
In this post, I’ll be sharing some of the things I learned, not quite in my usual blog format, but rather as a list of interesting facts and figures.
Like it or not, times have changed. Hunting costs have shot up, as its no more a matter of a one-day jungle hike to collect top grade agarwood (now its takes months of living and hunting in the jungle to get the same type of wood).
And so, for this reason even lower grades of agarwood are more expensive today, because every splinter of wood that is hauled back from the jungle has to play a role in recovering the hunting expenses.
Yes, compared to the massive Super King grade chunk pictured above, you can still find lower grade agarwood more easily. A week-long hunting trek will usually suffice.
But will agarwood from such trees produce oud oils of the calibre of yesteryears? I think you know Agar Aura’s answer to that.
PS: RM2,000 ≈ $450 today (March 7 2017).
The origins of Oud oil, this precious stuff we all love so much, can be traced back to either Assam or Sylhet. The answer to which one of these predates the other will depend on whether you ask a Bengali or an Indian, but one thing is certain: it was in Assam, India, where the first full-fledged oud distillation industry was born.
But this post is not about the evolution of Assamese distillation methodology, nor is it about the extinction of wild agarwood in Assam (which, fyi, has been officially extinct since ~ the 1950’s). I will briefly touch on these topics as well, but this post is primarily about a rare, elusive aroma. An aroma whose reputation precedes its recognition, and its actual existence today is usually more fiction than fact.
Continue reading
