Greengage

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Greengage is a green-skinned dessert plum. The note is a plum aroma pushed much further into sugar and honey than the generic plum note goes, with a faint green, grassy edge on top. It is golden and syrupy rather than dark and jammy. Unripe fruit is tart instead.

Scent Profile

Fruity leads and it is the one claim every source makes. Orange Pippin's tasting note is the most direct, 'some exquisite plum aroma, moderately better than a supermarket plum', with a 'strong flavour of pluot and a little bit of nectarine'. Honeyed is the second identity claim and it is quoted, 'the flavour sweet as honey and syrupy'. It sits above mirabelle plum's 0.40 because the sugar measurement backs it. Sweet_vanillic is Wikipedia's 'rich, confectionery flavour' plus the 40 per cent sugar figure, which is a number rather than an adjective and is the strongest fact in the dossier. Green is the note's name and its skin, and one source names it twice independently within the same tasting, 'very slight grass flavour' and 'there is something very green about the aroma'. It is held rather than higher because only that one source reports it and the source calls it slight. Sour is 'pleasantly tart, hard and crunchy', which Wikipedia attaches to unripe fruit, so it is the tart edge of a ripe one rather than the whole reading. Below the naming line: tropical and citrus are the 'nuances similar to mango' and 'citrus marmalade' from one sentence in one source, lactonic is the apricot in that same sentence, and aldehydic is the solvent tang in 'a tiny hint of the intensity of nail polish remover mixed with freshly mown grass'. Floral, boozy and aquatic_ozonic are held near zero because nothing states them.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~5h lasting

Family Fruity, Sweet & Gourmand

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Prunus domestica subsp. italica, grown in Europe since the 16th century and named in Britain after Sir William Gage. In France it is the Reine Claude. The sugar content is what growers write about first: ordinary plums measure in the teens by Brix, and a greengage can register in the upper 30s, with the water in the fruit bearing 40 per cent sugar. No perfumery house sells a greengage material and there is no absolute or extract. All the odour evidence is orchard and food writing.

Usage in Perfumery

A heart note in fruity and gourmand compositions, and a way to get a golden, honeyed stone fruit without the dark pruney weight the plum note brings. The faint green top makes it usable in fresh fruit accords where mirabelle or apricot would read as too soft.