La Montaña Wisteria Candle
Inspired by Spain, La Montaña is a proudly British-made brand, created by a clever old (in the nicest possible way) PR friend, Cassandra Hall, who moved up a Spanish mountain with her husband Jonathan several years ago and was so taken with the scents and aromas of their sun-drenched adopted homeland that she decided to capture them in a home fragrance collection.
And completely enraptured by the latest launch, Wisteria, which captures the scent of the mauve flower that garlanded Grenada's Alhambra Palace, a breathtaking venue where Cass and Jonathan celebrated their first wedding anniversary.
She wrote about this for The Scented Letter, the magazine Jo edits for The Perfume Society, back in 2017 – and we thought we'd share Cass's thoughts on wisteria below. Back then, the perfumer she was working with had found capturing a wisteria scent too elusive and challenging, but we're happy to say that thanks to the talents of Pia Long and Nick Gilbert at fragrance consultancy Olfiction, she – and we – no longer have to pine for the scent of wisteria.
Through their combined efforts, this candle's a triumph: sweet, pretty, a little bit iris-y, a little bit violet-y but altogether, overall, wisteria-y – we'd call it a 'boudoir' scent, with lipstick-y whispers, but very modern with it. As Cass observes, ‘You can really smell the mimosa and ylang ylang absolutes (which Pia says are most unusual in a candle fragrance), while the bergamot absolute stops it from being overwhelmingly blowsy.’
Enjoy Cass's story, below – and if you'd like to sign up for a quarterly free edition of The Scented Letter, visit here and sign up via the pop-up box.
And oh, we do love a happy ending! Especially in fragrant form.
£39 – buy here
As Cass wrote for The Scented Letter, back in 2017...
In March 1994, my husband Jonathan and I arrived at the Alhambra Palace in Granada, a romantic celebration of our first wedding anniversary. It was pitch dark and the sky was vast – and as we got out of the car, we were assailed by a most astonishing perfume. It was incredibly strong and absolutely gorgeous – but fiendishly, we couldn’t identify it. In the morning light, we discovered that we’d parked by the entrance to the Generalife Gardens, which were full of (as in: socking great purple walls of) centuries-old wisteria, in full bloom.
From that moment, I can’t pass wisteria without stopping to smell it – and without fail, the fragrance sends me straight back to that first night when I staggered around in circles in the dark, in raptures. I had, of course, come across wisteria before, because next day I recognised the flowers – but it was the sheer power of the perfume, and its glorious dominance of that still, dark night, that made it unforgettable.
I’m rather proud of wisteria for being impervious to the perfume makers – impossible to capture, in a bottle. I’d adore a wisteria fragrance or candle – but I’ve never come across anything that smells remotely like the real thing. We’ve tried to recreate that night by planting wisteria everywhere we’ve lived since – but it’s fair to say that it doesn’t love me as much as I love it. (I admit I’m a touch resentful that my mother and my sister both have houses successfully garlanded with it.)
I was surrounded by flowers, growing up – my mother and sister adore fresh-cut blooms (and my sister has her own fantastic floristry business, Rebel Rebel). But flowers weren’t the only fragrant influence on my earlier years. When I was a teenager, my father travelled extensively and regularly brought back Duty Free perfume for us all (wife and three daughters), so I had a pretty extensive fragrance wardrobe, long before there was a name for such a thing. It started with Carven Ma Griffe and Nina Ricci L’Air du Temps, moving into my Opium days – I only wore the body cream, which I thought made me special – then the Lancôme years, with Trésor and Poême my favourites. Currently I’m a big Narciso Rodriguez fan.
I’ve always been seriously picky about which shampoos, hand washes and clothes detergents I use, too – and I’d rather not have a bath than have one without a decadent bath oil. Fragrance-free I am not! Another smell that takes me right back is Galatéis Cleanser and Tonique Douceur, whose fragrances remind me explicitly of my early days working at Lancôme in 1987 – when I was simultaneously delighted by and terrified of my new employment. Those Lancôme years turned out to be a sensory delight.
Cut to the present day, and another olfactory experience has changed my life and my career, meanwhile. In 2011, we moved from London to a remote mountain village in Spain, in an attempt to slow life down and, quite literally, smell the coffee. Getting up at dawn to let the dogs out revealed a completely natural mountainside fragrance – one that was haunting and unique. It was so infatuating that after months of futile attempts to recreate it with essential oils (amateurs like me should never be allowed – I think I nearly poisoned us!), we asked a professional perfumer to try to bring it to life for us. As perfumers are actual geniuses, we now have a fragrance that is true to the smell of a summer dawn on our mountain – First Light – and since that turned out so well, we’ve translated other fragrant experiences from our new life into a home fragrance line, La Montaña.
I refuse to be upset by the fact that even our clever perfumer will never be able to concoct a wisteria scent, to conjure up the incredibly blooms of the Alhambra. I’ve simply resigned myself to the fact that while it’s possible to conjure up the scent of our local café, or the midwinter Three Kings festival (with its scents of cedarwood, frankincense and myrrh), or even the scent of the mountain after a summer storm, the closest I’m going to get to those intoxicating wisteria blooms is the design on our bedroom curtains…’
