Bergamot

Bergamot is a small, sour citrus fruit, Citrus bergamia, grown for the oil in its peel rather than for eating. In perfume it smells of orange and lemon at once, softened by something floral and faintly green, and it opens a great many fragrances, three of ours among them.

Where it comes from

Botanists consider bergamot a hybrid, most probably of lemon and bitter orange, the tree that also gives us neroli. Its home is the Ionian coast of the province of Reggio Calabria, at the toe of Italy, where it has been grown since the eighteenth century and where most of the world’s bergamot oil is still produced. Smaller crops come from elsewhere around the Mediterranean and further afield.

The oil is taken by cold pressing. Machines rasp the rind under running water, breaking the tiny oil glands without heat, and the oil is then separated from the water. A hundred fruit give about three ounces of oil. The same peel oil is the flavour of Earl Grey tea, in which black tea is scented with bergamot; the blend is usually connected with Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey and prime minister in the 1830s, though the story is far from certain.

What it smells like

Bergamot is less sharp than lemon and less sweet than orange. The first impression is bright, bitter-edged peel; then comes a soft floral side and, beneath it, a slight green note, as if a leaf had been left on the fruit. The oil is made up largely of limonene, linalyl acetate and linalool. To anyone raised on Earl Grey it is also, unmistakably, a teacup at four o’clock.

How perfumers use it

Bergamot is one of the most widely used materials in perfumery, and it sits most often in the top notes, where it gives a fragrance its first light and lifts whatever follows. It also has history. When Johann Maria Farina made his eau de Cologne in Cologne in the early eighteenth century, he combined bergamot and other citrus oils with alcohol, and the earliest known record of bergamot oil used in perfume, from 1714, survives in the Farina archive.

Ordinary bergamot oil contains bergapten, a furocoumarin that can make skin react to sunlight. For that reason the industry’s standards limit how much of it may go into products left on the skin. Producers also make a bergapten-free oil, often labelled FCF (furocoumarin-free), by removing those compounds, usually through distillation, while keeping the scent close to that of the pressed oil.

In our fragrances

Bergamot appears in three of our eaux de parfum. In Racing Green, Calabrian bergamot brightens the sharp, bitter green of galbanum and freshly mown grass at first light in the paddock, before violet leaf, vetiver and, at last, saddle leather and oakmoss. In The Library it sits beside pink pepper and cardamom, a match struck in a dim room, ahead of tobacco leaf, papyrus and orris. In Henley it gives a snap to cool cucumber and garden mint, the river in the first week of July.

It is in the Drawing Room Candle too, beside smoked black tea, which will make sense to anyone who takes Earl Grey. To try the three eaux de parfum side by side, the Discovery Set holds all six of our fragrances.

All the notes