There is a particular quality of light in the Greek mountains in summer. Sharp and clean, the kind that arrives without apology, pouring down over great sandstone pillars that rise from the plain like something dreamed rather than formed by nature. My grandparents lived in a village high up in that landscape, close to the sky, close to ancient monasteries with their bells and their silence, and the air up there carries something you cannot find anywhere else on earth. As a child, visiting them there, I would slip out of the house before breakfast, before anyone was stirring, and disappear into that landscape as though it had been waiting for me. I was, looking back, a peculiar sort of child. While others kicked footballs and climbed walls, I was filling my pockets with things. Sprigs of wild thyme growing stubbornly from the cracks between rocks. Handfuls of mountain oregano so potent it made your eyes water. Pine cones still sticky with resin that left my fingers amber coloured and smelling of the forest for the rest of the day. Sage leaves that released their sharp and silvery scent the moment you bruised them between your fingers. I would carry them home like a naturalist returning from an expedition, push them into little jars of water, cover them with a saucer and place them on the sunniest windowsill I could find. I was macerating, though I had no idea that was what it was called. I was simply trying to capture something. To hold a moment still long enough to understand it.

My grandmother’s kitchen was its own kind of education. She made preserves the way some people pray, slowly, attentively, with great faith in the process. Sour cherry jam stirred for hours until it turned the colour of garnets. Spoon sweets made from bergamot candied slowly in sugar syrup until they became something between a confection and a perfume. And always, threaded through everything, the smell of woodsmoke and mountain air drifting in through the open window, settling into the curtains, into the walls, into the memory of everyone who ever sat at that table. I was always beside her, watching the wooden spoon trace its slow circles, learning without knowing I was learning that fragrance is not a single thing but a conversation, between impressions that arrive first and vanish like a rumour, and deeper, warmer truths that only reveal themselves with patience and time.

It was in that kitchen that I first understood something which no book had yet told me and no classroom ever would. That scent is not an afterthought or an accessory to experience. It is the experience itself, arriving before thought, bypassing reason entirely, reaching straight into the part of you that remembers without trying to. A whiff of sour cherry, freshly baked bread and woodsmoke and I am eight years old again, standing on a stool, stealing jam from the cooling pot with a teaspoon while my grandmother pretends not to notice. The years passed and the obsession never left. I discovered essential oils, resins, absolutes, a whole extraordinary vocabulary of smell that opened up like a continent I had somehow always known existed. I began building accords the way a poet builds a line, intuitively, with great pleasure, with a great deal of failure and the occasional moment of something that felt very close to grace. A solar mineral chord that tried to bottle the smell of warm sandstone at noon. A cherry blossom gourmand that lived somewhere between a Japanese garden and a patisserie. A tobacco accord that came out rather darker and smokier than intended but was none the worse for it.

I am a hobbyist, and I say that word with nothing but pride and affection. Perfumery chose me long before I chose it, on a mountainside somewhere in Greece, on a summer morning, in the hands of a small boy who simply could not stop smelling things. That boy is still very much present whenever I uncap a bottle of rose absolute or hold a blotter to the light. He is still trying to capture something. Still convinced that if he gets the balance just right, he will find inside a fragrance the exact feeling of that mountain air, that kitchen, that sharp and luminous summer light filtering down between the great rocks above the valley. He has not found it yet. But the search, as any perfumer worth their salt will tell you, is rather the whole point…