Maqui Berry

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Maqui is the purple-black fruit of Aristotelia chilensis, a Chilean tree also called the Chilean wineberry. No source found describes how it smells. Two describe how it tastes, and both reach for blackberry first. One adds tart huckleberry. So the vector is dark berry fruit with a real tart edge, and it is an analogy rather than an observation. It sits at cosine 0.9693 from the published blackberry note. That closeness is the honest result of scoring one comparison, not a claim that the two smell alike.

Scent Profile

Fruity leads because it is the only thing both sources say, and they say the same thing: 'tastes similar to blackberries' and 'a taste comparable to blackberries'. It is set below blackberry's own 0.78 because both statements are about taste, not smell, and a taste comparison is one step removed from an odour claim. Sour is 'taste like tart huckleberries', the one place a source separates maqui from blackberry rather than equating them. It is set just under blackberry's sour for the same reason of distance from the evidence. Sweet_vanillic and green are below the naming bar and are held there deliberately: a ripe dark berry usually carries both, but no source names either here, and inventing them would be asserting facts nobody stated. Floral is the same kind of restraint applied to the rose-and-damascenone character that dark berries often carry, as in the published acai-berry note. Every facet here has a spread of 0.09 to 0.22 because the evidence base is two food pages.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Fruity

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

Origin

The berry of Aristotelia chilensis, an evergreen tree of central and southern Chile and adjacent Argentina. The fruit is small, purple-black and edible. It is eaten raw, made into jam, and sold dried and powdered as a food supplement for its anthocyanin content. That supplement trade is why the term is in circulation at all.

Usage in Perfumery

One attestation in the Fragrantica note vocabulary and none in Parfumo. No perfumer, supplier or analytical source describing its aroma was found. Use it as a dark-berry accent in the blackberry register, tarter and less jammy, and expect a reconstruction rather than a natural. There is no maqui essential oil in trade.