Sienne l'Hiver means Winter in Siena. This fragrance captures the wintertime smells of Siena - smoky, subtle nuances like coal-roasted chestnuts, autumn leaves, truffles, straw and iris root. The tourists are away and a hushed stroll through the medieval buildings lets you travel through time. This is a quiet fragrance, full of smoke and whispers and solitude. It invites you to listen to your deepest thoughts. This fragrance was created by the incomparable Bertrand Duchafour and unfortunately is no longer available.
It opens with fresh, torn leaves – so green and vivid you can smell the sap. The last stragglers of fall crushed beneath your feet as you realize that Fall has officially crossed into winter. The subtle sweetness of roasted chestnuts intertwines with cool, misty iris root and the aching scent of wood smoke. There are hints of white truffle and black olive. Clean and earthy and close to the skin, this is not designed to entice or bedazzle, but to lead you into deep conversations over an espresso with a long-lost friend. Comforting and contemplative, it captures the refined world of the Renaissance city of Siena – a sophisticated and award-winning fragrance of subtle earthy nuances.
Sienne l'Hiver has top notes of geranium, violet and fern; middle notes of iris, white truffle and olibanum; and base notes of hay, labdanum and gaiacwood. Sienne L'Hiver is an eau de toilette, edt.
An excerpt of a review from Olfactics:
Sienne L’Hiver (Sienne Winter) is true olfactory portraiture; a landscape artwork captured in scent. A paleness with depth, Sienne L’Hiver is a moment in history suspended in time. On opening, Sienne L’Hiver has a pallid quality like murky water. It smells grey and mellow, with an oily slick on the surface. The scent is flat, with an overall vegetal (orris) and bracing (chilled oily vodka) smell. From the get-go, a distinction can be made: as a fragrant artwork, that is, a landscape of Siena in December with snowflakes falling from the sky – it is austere perfection. What is Sienna in winter? Siena is a collection of winter streets, cobblestones, and snowflakes … But these things don’t have a scent! To mend this, black olives, olive oil, white truffle and leather are positioned tactically within Sienne L’Hiver, affixed with cool and unctuous aromamolecules and ingredients. To add a persistent theme throughout Sienne L’Hiver, there is a strong push in a spiced iris direction, compounded with woody nuances.
Imagine snow capped mountains in the background with coal fires in the foreground, the fragrance opens itself up eventually to a spherical damp greenness, softening with a vortex of diaphanous woods. There’s the mineral quality present in great proportions, like cool cobblestone paths and crisp air – yet this as a whole maintains a minimalist style; a magisterial quality associated with most Duchaufour works.
Break the mesmerizing illusion however, and find the impression of rubber, delicate florals, pine, incense and fur. I suspect this is what makes the crystalline smoke feature in the fragrance relatively everlasting and continually present. Each ingredient, from top note to the heaviest base note, seem to amalgamate into one big heart of the fragrance – parallel lines getting closer and closer.
