Borneo 2000

“Borneo Kinam is described as “The most beautiful and uplifting oud oil I have ever smelled.” Borneo 3000 now sells for thousands. Borneo 4000… I don’t even know of anybody who’s willing to sell it!

It’s something both distiller and connoisseur will ask themselves:

1. How do you follow up such a line-up? Oud that just gets better and better. Oud that doubles, triples and quadruples in value.

2. What’s more, how to distill a successor to such Borneos without the need to ask $2,000+ a bottle?

The short answer is:

1. Follow the blueprint. How’d we make those Borneo greats?

2. This is the tricky part…

Here’s how we did it: Team up with the man that almost single-handedly spread oud distillation throughout Malaysia. Take out a bag of wild black Borneo resin. Prep the pots and the pipes to run an artisanal extraction. Tweak the temperature. Fire up the burners. Then, wait… for seven years.

One thing the great Borneos—3000, 4000, Kinam, 50K—have in common is their olfactory harmony.

This means that from top to drydown, you don’t find a dramatic change or decline in scent—the fruits don’t suddenly disappear to make way for the woods. This is the mark of a great Borneo. Take the raspberry fruitiness of Borneo 3000.

Whether it’s the first whiff or two hours later, the profile holds beautifully steady—three hours later you might well fool yourself into thinking you just put on a swipe a minute ago!

I’d go so far as to say that the 2000 ranks top here. The scent progression is super steady and hardly swerves. You’ll need an extremely acute olfactory radar to pick up the drop from top to heart to drydown.

Borneo 2000 was crafted almost eight years ago and has been naturally aging since. Back then, it would still be another year before we published the first End of Oud announcement. For one, this meant that prices for rare raw agarwood were still sane! It also meant that we were still on a Borneo high and eager to make artisanal Borneo ouds the way we’ve been making them.

Think Borneo 3000 and you think vanilla. The sign of the successor is this: there’s no shortage of vanilla here! At moments you smell fresh Mahogany peeled from the bark. A semi-dry cedarwoodiness gently swiped with moist brown sugar, honey and maple syrup. That makes this your go-to Oud for going out. What Borneo 2000 adds to the palette is a musk-meets-frankincense mellowness that makes the 2000 fuller, more woody and less airy than the rest of the series.

Same techniques, same tradition, pristine wild Borneo agarwood. That’s how Borneo 2000 fits in with 3000, 4000 and Borneo Kinam….

Note: This is a follow-up distillation to the 2010 release (long since sold out), using superior agarwood. So, the profile is the same… but you get added depth, the notes are more intricate, and that fresh-forest core that got the first release so much praise is now even cleaner and crisper.” — Ensar Oud