@Ensar, does the age of the tree matter in terms of the sweetness of an oil? And what would be the difference between an Organic oil from a tree 5 years or less that was aged for about 5 years after distillation and that from an older tree, say about 10 years or older, but is a fresh or new?
Very good questions, AbuAyoob. Theoretically speaking,
the age of the tree has nothing to do with the quality of the oil. You
can get better oil from a 5 year-old tree than from a 100 year-old tree. It's happened before and it continues to happen – which is why cultivation is bound to succeed.
How is that possible? Because what matters ultimately is the age of the
infection,
not the age of the tree. If this were sandalwood, where the essential oil is produced naturally within the wood itself, without an external trigger, that would make perfect sense: the older the tree the better. However this being agarwood, where the essential oil is the result of a wound that occurs in the trunk of the tree as a result of which the tree then emits the aromatic resin, the age of the tree is absolutely no indicator as to what quality Oud oil you're likely to get when you harvest a wild tree.
Someone offered me a 100 year-old tree in Thailand, and I declined to purchase it. They said, 'It's your gamble. If there is no resin inside, you lose!' So I opted to purchase a 60 year-old organically cultivated tree which I
knew had resin inside.
In cultivated trees, we
know there is resin inside the trunk because the trunk is methodically wounded by the farmers. Some farmers even inject Oud hydrosol admixed with the wooden dregs left over after distillation inside the wounds so they can trigger the infection. Most farmers inject Biotech, a synthetic drug manufactured in Indonesia specifically to induce infection in Aquilaria trees.
Do you now see how randomly harvesting wild trees, which may or may not contain agarwood, is a proper crime given the guaranteed results of cultivation?
The age of the tree has nothing to do with the sweetness of the oil, rather this goes back to the species of tree and the scent characteristics it carries. I don't think a Maroke oil could ever smell 'sweet' in the same way a Cambodi smells sweet, simply because it comes from a different type of agarwood. There are several techniques, when distilling the Oud, which have a lot to do with the way the oil ends us smelling. A great example of this is the stark contrast between Oud Yusha and Encens d'Angkor. The Angkor is smoky and dark, while Yusha is very sweet and resinous. Both portray the typical
aquilaria crassna characteristics, however the way they're treated prior to distillation, and then the way they are distilled plays a great part in the characteristics of each oil, sweetness included.
I have never seen an organic tree that is 5 years or less. So far I've only visited Cambodia and Thailand where they generally harvest trees that are at least 15 years. I hear they harvest the trees at 5 years in Laos but am very skeptical about that, and have resolved to go see this for myself; and if it is the case, whether we can't do anything to change it.
