Chanel No.5 is like great wine

When you tell people that you are going to the South of France in the second week of May, you get knowing looks.

"Ah yes," they say, “the Cannes Film Festival”. And yes, just as the season begins on the French Riviera, the events pile up.

 

There is the two-week long champagne-fuelled orgy of deal-making and red-carpet posing that is the Cannes Film Festival. A few miles away, in Monte Carlo, they are busy with their own events. The tennis tournaments are winding down, there is a buzz over the Bal De La Rose and the gamblers have arrived to throw their cash at the tables in the casino.

 

   And all over the Riviera, the smell of money is in the air. The Russians arrive in their mega-yachts and hit the shores of Antibes. Nice is over-run by rich women in designer versions of what is intended to be summer wear. At Cap Ferrat, the more discreet stars, who have been forced by the studio to fly in for the Film Festival, skulk by the pool of the Hotel Eden Roc, glad to avoid the carnival that is the Cannes party circuit. At the Nice/Cote d’Azur airport, Chinese actresses, here to walk the Cannes Red Carpet, squeal angrily as they realise that there are no porters and that you can only get baggage trolleys if you happen to have Euro coins on your person.

 

   It is all quite over-the-top and slightly ridiculous.

 

   But I love it, anyway.

 

   I’m now something of a South of France veteran, having hit this region nearly every year in May and June (it gets really hot in July and August) whether it is to make TV films at the Cannes Festival, watch the tennis in Monaco or drive along the hill roads to Saint Paul de Vence.

 

   Unless you are French, you never really feel like you belong in France. (The French like it that way.) And sometimes that can make you feel alone and discomfited.

 

   But in the South of France, at least in the late spring and the early summer, that doesn’t really matter. Nobody feels at home, anyway, not even the locals. The entire region turns into a pleasure playground and so many foreigners visit (last year ten million tourists came to the South of France, a region less than half the size of Maharashtra) that everyone accepts that this is an unreal place in an unreal time.

 

   And yet, there are parts of the Riviera that are free of the May madness. They have stayed essentially French, I suspect, because the international jet-set has not heard of them.

 

   One such place is the village (now small town) of Grasse. It is only a short drive from Nice (under an hour) and yet it might be a world apart. I went in May while the Festival fever had overtaken Cannes and Nice. But in Grasse, life was as it had always been over the last few years. There were no topless starlets, no Hollywood deal-makers in reflective sunglasses and even the rich Russians and Arabs had given the area a miss.

 

   Every Frenchmen knows what Grasse is, of course, just as he knows why Beaune, Chablis or Epernay are famous. In the post Second World War era, as Germany has prided itself on its industrial prowess, French has emerged as the land of luxury: wine, cuisine, couture, and of course, fragrance.

 

   And there is no town in the world more associated with perfume than Grasse. For the people of Grasse, fragrance is their religion and their livelihood, just as much as Rheims or Epernay are built on billions of fine bubbles and magnums of champagne.

 

   The French perfume tradition dates back to the Bourbons (wicked English people say that the court at Versailles stank because the nobles washed so rarely and fragrance was a necessity rather than a luxury). And for several centuries now, the French have excelled at extracting the essential oils of such flowers as rose, iris and jasmine and blending them into fine fragrance.

 

   Because the terroir of Grasse is especially suited to cultivating aromatic flowers, grasses, herbs and plants, the village was the original perfume garden of France. And, rather like the wine trade in Burgundy Bordeaux or Champagne, the entire area developed around that single commodity: perfume.

 

   In the great wine regions, wine-making is an artisanal process, passed down from father to son through the generations. It is also an essentially agricultural activity. A good wine-maker will tell you that he is merely bottling the taste of his terroir.

 

   It is much the same with the perfumers of Grasse. Most of them have been doing this for generations and they remain in the town (as the village has now become) because they want to stay close to the perfume materials and the plants on which they are grown.

 

   The most iconic and famous perfume in the world is, of course, Chanel No.5 and it has its origins in Grasse. Coco Chanel was a great couturier but she was not a perfumer. When she decided that she wanted a perfume that she could sell in her store, she turned to Ernest Beaux, one of the great perfumers of his time.

 

   Many legends surround the creation of No. 5. What we know for certain is that Beaux used the best flowers he could find in Grasse. He chose the local jasmine and the May rose, which are characteristic of the region as the primary ingredients. He sophisticated the fragrance with small quantities of other perfume materials (musks and even Indian sandalwood) before adding aldehydes, a synthetic material that has the ability to add lustre and sparkle to fragrance.

 

   That much is fact. The legend is that one of Beaux’s assistants made a mistake and put too much aldehyde into one sample. Another legend is that Beaux presented various samples to Coco Chanel and she chose the one with the most aldehydes. Because it was the fifth sample, it was called No. 5.

 

   Whatever the truth is, what is undeniable is that Number 5 became the most famous perfume in the world after Coco Chanel tied up with the Wertheimer family, owners of a cosmetic line called Bourjois, to manufacture it.

 

   That was in the 1920s. But by the 1940s, disaster had struck. The Germans occupied France and the Wertheimers, who were Jewish, had to flee to America. Aware of the global demand for No. 5, even in wartime, the Wertheimers tried manufacturing No. 5 in America. To their disappointment they found that the fragrance could not be made without the flowers of Grasse – no other jasmine and no other rose would do.

 

   So, despite the German Occupation, the Wertheimers arranged for jasmine and rose to be smuggled out of Grasse and transported to America. Once they had the original ingredients, they could make No. 5 and soon, production resumed.

 

   After the War, the Wertheimers returned to France, were eventually back in business with Coco Chanel (who sold them the whole company, including the couture label) and resumed production of fragrances under the Chanel name.

 

   Ernest Beaux gave way to another perfumer, Henri Robert, and the house of Chanel, though still headquartered on the Rue Cambon in Paris, maintained its traditional links with Grasse, its flower gardens and its perfumers.

 

   In the Seventies, Chanel hired the man who many people regard as the greatest perfumer of his generation – Jacques Polge, who came from a long line of Grasse perfumers. Polge flitted between Grasse and Paris, smelling the flowers each season and creating fragrances based on what he smelt. Most of the Chanel fragrances you and I have heard of are all Polge’s creations: Coco, Allure, Chance, Bleu and their many variants.

 

"The idea of re-inventing Chanel No. 5 sounds outrageous. And yet, it is not as revolutionary as you may think. Jacques has done it twice himself."

   I first met Polge over a decade ago. He is a shy man, deeply immersed in his work and without the fripperies associated with fashion people: at one Chanel couture show I noticed that he wore a smart shirt under his elegant suit but the French cuffs were left loose. He had either forgotten to put in his cuff-links or had decided he couldn’t be bothered.

 

   I asked Polge, the first time I met him, why he became a perfumer. He looked a little surprised. It was a little like asking a vigneron why he was interested in wine. He grew up with perfume, he said, so it was only natural that he would drift into the business. Polge’s roots in Grasse and its tradition of perfumery influenced his fragrances. They always seemed to come from the terroir of the South of France and his finest perfumes seemed to me to distil the beauty of Grasse just as some great wines (a Romanee Conti or Le Montrachet) capture the essence of Burgundy: it is always about elegance, smoothness and style, not about power or strength. Even his strongest fragrance, the masculine Egoiste, is based on the herbs of the South of France.

 

   In 2003, when I was discussing the Grasse tradition with Polge, he told me about his son Olivier. He too had followed in the family tradition, he said, and had joined International Flavours and Fragrances, a fragrance-for-hire giant that made perfumes for a variety of designers, though eventually when the fragrances were marketed, no mention would be made of the role of International Flavours and Fragrances or the individual perfumer.

 

   And over time, I followed Olivier Polge's career by checking on who really made the fragrances I liked. One of the most influential men’s fragrances of the last two decades is Dior Homme (which I still wear) and though much was made of the Dior name and of Hedi Slimane who was then the menswear designer at Dior, it turned out that Olivier had created the perfume. Viktor and Rolf were more honest with crediting Olivier with the creation of their bestselling Flowerbomb and Spicebomb (which I like to think of as one generation removed from his father's Egoiste)

 

   Two years ago, Chanel announced that Jacques Polge would be taking a less active role. His successor would be – who else? -- Olivier Polge!

 

   So far, Olivier has done only two fragrances for Chanel’s limited edition Exclusifs range: Misia and Boy (sold only in the Paris boutique). So, I was a little startled when Chanel invited me to Grasse to meet him to discuss his new project: a re-imagining of Chanel No. 5

 

   A new no. 5? Gosh! The younger Polge isn’t lacking in confidence, I though.

 

   Which is how I found myself back in a lovely corner of the Riviera, away from the Arabs, the oligarchs and the movie producers. I stayed in a small (50 room) country hotel called Mas de Pierre and drove to Pegomas, a village near Grasse to meet Olivier.

 

   Pegomas has a special link with Chanel. As the world’s rich flocked to the Riviera, property prices everywhere in the region --- even Grasse and its environs ---- shot through the roof.  Farmers decided that it was easier to sell their land than to cultivate it. Timeshare apartments (mainly for rich French people; Grasse is not so desirable to oil sheikhs) came up where flowers had once bloomed and Chanel’s supply of flowers was threatened.

 

   The company acted swiftly. It tied up with the farming Mul family and promised to purchase as many roses and jasmine flowers as the Muls could grow - at very high prices. That way, the Muls would not lose out by continuing to grow flowers. Today something like 95 per cent of all the jasmine grown in Grasse is bought by Chanel. So is the vast majority of the rose.

 

   Chanel No. 5 is like great wine: if you don’t get the grapes from the right vineyard or the flowers from the right garden, you can’t make either of them.

 

   Chanel had chosen the week of the rose harvest for Olivier’s coming-out party and in a sense it was appropriate. As he talked about about the world’s most famous fragrance, you would see, outside the window, the pickers, hard at work, gathering the roses that would go into No. 5.

 

   Olivier lacks the courtly demeanour of his father --- perhaps that comes with age --- but he has the same modest air and the same seriousness about fragrance. And of course, like Jacques, he recognises that Chanel No. 5 must be a product of the terroir of Grasse.

 

   The idea of re-inventing Chanel No. 5 sounds outrageous. And yet, it is not as revolutionary as you may think. Jacques has done it twice himself. In the 1980s, when the world went mad for big fragrances, Chanel was scared that No. 5 might seem too well-mannered in the age of Giorgio of Beverly Hills.

 

   So the senior Polge rebalanced the fragrance and Chanel sold it as the Eau de Parfum. But Jacques is the sort of man who would probably leave the room if you sprayed Giorgio of Beverly Hills, so it was never quite the big fragrance Chanel had hoped for. It is still around. But the changes are so subtle that most people don’t realise that the Eau de Parfum differs from the perfume and the Eau de Toilette (both made to Beaux’s formula).

 

   More recently, Polge gave reformulation a full-fledged shot. This time around, he once told me, he sat down and said to himself, “What would Mr Beaux have done if he had been around today and had access to the perfume materials that were not around in the 1920's?”

 

   The answer was a masterful fragrance called Eau Premiere within the Chanel No 5 umbrella. I like it a lot because it still captures the spirit of Grasse but is more contemporary and you can wear it during the day without feeling over-fragranced.

 

   I suspect Olivier, as a hot, young modern perfumer, was given a specific brief by his Chanel bosses: make it younger.

 

   Except that he is so skilful a perfumer that he has managed to do this without diverting at all from Beaux’s original conception. There is a little citrus in the top note which breaks the heaviness. And the bottom note, which becomes most evident in the dry-down (how the perfume smells after it has been on your skin for a while), has a delicious hint of cedar which missing from the original.

 

   It is almost as though Olivier, like Jacques, sat down and thought: “What would my father have done to this fragrance if he were my age?"

 

   I expect it will be a huge commercial success. After all, every generation deserves its own Chanel No. 5.

 

   I spent two days in the rose gardens of Pegomas and in the chateaux of Grasse. Despite the gloomy forecast, it did not rain at all and the sun shone on the roses and filled the room as Olivier talked about his passion for perfume.

 

   And then, one afternoon, I took a taxi, drove through the Riviera’s hill roads and arrived at the Nice/Cote d’Azur airport. The first lot of Festival delegates were leaving, their screenings complete. They had mountains of luggage, trolleys were in short supply (even for those who had the right coins) and the crowds jostled and pushed in the immigration area.

 

   That’s one kind of Riviera, I thought. And Grasse is another.

 

   Fame or fragrance; take your pick!