Horchata

Note Profile

Prepared

About

Horchata is a cold sweet grain drink read as a gourmand accord. It is milky and sweet first, with a cinnamon dusting over it and a starchy, nutty grain body underneath. It is thinner and cooler than a cooked milk pudding, and the cinnamon is the part a wearer names.

Scent Profile

Sweet vanillic leads: this is the sugar-and-vanilla body both sources name, and DOOP puts vanilla bean and brown sugar in the middle and base. Nutty is next and is the one facet every source agrees on, though they disagree about its source - almonds and starchy rice grain in the Mexican reading, tiger nuts in the Spanish one. Warm spice is cinnamon, which DOOP places at the top of its pyramid and Nottier calls the drink's "warm spice accents"; it sits below the sweetness because both sources describe it as an accent on a creamy base rather than the base itself. Lactonic is the milk - rice milk, condensed milk, the "milky sweetness" Nottier leads with. Below those: powdery for the starchy rice dust, earthy for the tiger-nut side that only the Spanish reading supplies, honeyed for brown sugar, and thin creamy_woody, clean_musk and tobacco_hay traces for the tonka and the toasted-grain edge.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~12h lasting

Family Sweet & Gourmand, Spicy

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

Origin

Prepared. There is no horchata extract. The drink itself splits by region and the sources disagree about which one the note tracks. Wikipedia records the split: Spain drinks horchata de chufa, made from soaked ground tiger nuts, while Mexico makes it from rice, cinnamon and sugar, sometimes with milk. Both trade sources reached here build the perfumery note from the Mexican reading. Nottier calls it "a blend of rice milk, almonds, and cinnamon". DOOP Fragrance publishes a pyramid of ground cinnamon and sweet rice steam over condensed milk and vanilla bean, on toasted rice milk, brown sugar and soft tonka.

Usage in Perfumery

A gourmand heart-and-base accord for cosy, spiced, milky compositions. It does the job of a milk-and-cinnamon note that is not a custard and not a chai. It sits with rice, tonka, almond and vanilla, and it needs no fruit to carry a composition.