Wishing Grasse was greener

April is not the best time to visit Grasse, the perfume capital of the world. The novel Perfume by Patrick Süskind makes this town in Provence, France, seem like utopia for the scent-obsessed, where endless flower fields release heady fragrances into the air before being gathered into baskets and brought to the great perfumeries. There, alchemists with talented noses would sit beside their copper stills, extract the floral essences and somehow magically transform them into olfactory works of art.

On the contrary, Grasse, which overlooks the Cote d’Azur in the south of France, only truly comes alive in the summer months, and April is … well, the wishy-washy middle of spring. Some days are beautiful and sunny, but there’s a better chance the sky will be overcast with those April showers that bring May flowers, and so it was on the day we rented two cars and drove from our hotel in Nice to Grasse, which was about an hour away.

Grasse was one of the last stops in a long-dreamed-of Provencal vacation that had its origins in the reading of Perfume, not to mention Peter Mayle’s best-selling book, A Year in Provence. Part of the dream was the rolling lavender fields that have become the main visual cue of Provence, and of its perfumed products, in particular.

But here we were in April, while lavender starts blooming in late June. Centifolia roses unfurl their petals in May (hence Rose de Mai, a prized ingredient in perfumery), and the same goes for the other flowers Grasse is famous for: jasmine, tuberose and orange blossom.

So we weren’t exactly expecting a small city perched high on the hills above the Mediterranean, with no flower fields in sight nor any distinct aroma to speak of. With its narrow, rain-slicked roads winding around colorful, multi-storied houses — many of which you’d have to access via stairs set into the hillsides — Grasse reminded us of nothing so much as Baguio, albeit with perfume factories.

Though Grasse has about eight perfumeries and one International Perfumery Museum, only three are considered major — the houses with names ending in “-ard” — Fragonard, Molinard and Galimard. Galimard, despite being the oldest maison (it was founded in 1747 by Jean de Galimard, a lord who was a good friend of Goethe’s), hasn’t released a perfume of note this century, so given that we had time to visit only two places, we opted for Molinard and Fragonard.

I was less of a stranger to Molinard, as the owner of two bottles of Molinard perfume I had bought before ever setting foot on the premises: one was Tendre Friandises (Tender Delicacies), a cheap and cheerful candy scent that I found irresistible; the other was Habanita, a masterful concoction of vanilla and vetiver that is considered Molinard’s only “serious” fragrance. Described by its makers as the “perfume for cigarettes” (whatever that means), for me Habanita smells like a sexy young Latin señorita who maybe dances flamenco, wears a flower in her hair, and has just emerged from a smoky club where dashing men in impeccably cut black suits puff on Cuban cigars.

Founded in 1849, today Molinard is still family-run, though you never meet anyone from the family in the tourist-clogged showroom. The lobby still holds more than a whiff of Molinard’s storied past. Once an old perfume factory that was designed by Gustave Eiffel — yes, the same Eiffel who built the Eiffel Tower — the holding area is now a mini-museum where you can view Molinard’s first fragrances in crystal bottles by Baccarat and Lalique. It’s said that Molinard’s initial customers from England and Russia came to admire the 17th- and 18th-century furniture and left with bottles of cologne and flower-scented waters.

Maybe most of Grasse’s tourists are French, maybe the town is still stubbornly set in the old ways, but all the factory tours are conducted in French and English speakers are out of luck. If you’re quick you might be able to grab a brochure typed in English, but even these are confiscated after the tour and given to the next hapless Angleterre. Basically we are led through a number of different rooms in which they extract floral essences through various methods: distillation, maceration (flowers are placed on sheets of hot or cold animal fat, which absorb their fragrance and are then washed with alcohol to obtain an absolute), and the use of volatile solvents (dissolving the fragrance-bearing part of the plant in a solvent, which is then evaporated).

Once all the perfume-making techniques have been explained and signature products trotted out, the tour always ends at the factory boutique, where the properly appetized customers load up on the perfumes, soaps and creams they’ve just been told about.

While keeping interest in treasures like Habanita alive, Molinard currently wields a special affinity for a young, fun-loving market. Everyone in my family loved new release Mirea, a charming, pink-tinted fruity-floral, while I went one further and bought a bottle of Fleur du Chocolat, the house’s latest delicious gourmand.

At Fragonard we went through practically the same tour, the only difference being the factory layout and historical details. Eugene Fuchs, an entrepreneur who also loved perfume, set up his own perfumery in 1926 and named it after Grasse-born painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Current owners the Costa family expanded the business while collecting rare, perfume-related items, which they now display in the Fragonard museum. You can now find Fragonard’s beautifully packaged soaps in hotels throughout France, while popular fragrances like the heady floral Belle de Nuit (Beauty of the Night) and refreshing cologne Eau du Bonheur (Water of Happiness) come in gilded aluminum bottles.

I ended up taking home Fragonard’s sweet oriental Diamant, not only because I fell in love with it but also because its icy top notes — as crystalline as the diamond it’s named after — remind me of the rain that fell throughout our all-too-brief tour of Grasse.