Granada

Granada: A Familiar Word, But What Does It Mean?

For April, I am adding Granada to my Summer In The Seventies scent family.
Granada is the Spanish word for "pomegranate," and it is also a historic city in southern Spain.
Achieving a mouthwatering pomegranate accord that accurately captures the scent + taste perception can be quite a challenge, especially when using the actual aroma chemicals present in the fruit. There are GCMS papers available online, but as anyone in perfumery knows, a GCMS is just a simple analysis compared to the multiple aspects that affect our olfactory perception.

The Inspiration For The Fragrance 

There was a pomegranate vine that covered the entire width at the back of my maternal grandmother's orchard, a few hundred feet long. God only knows how many decades it had been growing over the chicken wire; as grandma said, "vino con la casa," it came with the house. In February, the chicken wire would form exhausted arches with the outlines of a suspended bridge under the weight of the fruit. We used to get sick eating them green; we, along with the chickens, ducks, and geese, for as long as we were all allowed to roam the orchard.

Green pomegranate is an excellent laxative and diuretic. It just really hurts a lot in your tummy. The birds would get drunk and faint, and we would promise our lives to the Virgin Mary if only She could make us go "just once and for all." It was never just once and for all, sadly. But the next day, we were all out again, fighting with the birds for the reddest fruits.

Granada: Some History 

Some say that Granada, the city, got its name from the red soil of the region. What is true is that the fruit was introduced to Southern Europe in the 16th Century and eventually made its way to the Americas. Pomegranates were considered the forbidden fruit; they were adopted as symbols of prosperity and were painted by the masters. 

So, in terms of inspiration, I had plenty to work with, but I wanted to remain loyal to the mouthwatering effect of pomegranate arils when you cut a ripe fruit, and I wanted it to be a summer candle.

The result is a fruity gourmand fragrance with the expected strong diffusion of red fruit accords. Still, it is elegantly simple in its purpose of recalling mischievous afternoons fighting with chickens under the scorching heat of summers in the pampas.

RHR