Vanilla Bahiana

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Vanilla Bahiana is the pod of Vanilla bahiana, a wild Brazilian vanilla species. It is a vanilla that is not sweet-led. The one trade description found calls it smoky, woody and drier than Bourbon vanilla, with a resinous edge closer to copal than to cake batter.

Scent Profile

Sweet_vanillic leads, but only just, and the margin is the whole judgement in this row. It is a vanilla, the botany paper confirms the species makes vanillin, and every attested use is a vanilla, so the facet cannot be low. It sits well under plain vanilla at 0.90 and under vanilla-caviar at 0.82 because the only olfactive source says outright it is 'less vanillin-dominant than Bourbon vanilla' and 'moderately sweet'. Smoky sits directly behind it and is the reason this is a separate row rather than an alias of vanilla. The source leads its own description with the word smoky and attributes it to guaiacol, which is published here at smoky. It is held below that because guaiacol is one constituent of a pod, not the pod. Amber_resinous is the 'resinous quality that suggests copal or balsam'. Dry_woody is the 'woody depth' the same sentence gives the phenolics. Earthy and mineral are both stated in the comparison against Bourbon: 'drier and earthier', 'drier and more mineral'. Below the reported band, leather is carried down from guaiacol's own leather, kept as a trace because the source names leather as a blending partner rather than as something it smells of. Nothing else is scored. One trade glossary carries every odour claim here, so the spreads are 0.20 to 0.25 across the top six and the confidence is 0.30.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeBase · ~30h lasting

Family Sweet & Gourmand, Woody & Earthy, Amber · Musk · Leather

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

Origin

Vanilla bahiana Hoehne is endemic to the Atlantic Forest of Bahia, Brazil, and Biota Neotropica records its conservation status as Endangered. The same peer-reviewed source places it phylogenetically close to V. planifolia and reports it produces vanillin and other vanilla-flavour compounds (Lopes 2018). It is not cultivated at commercial scale. Premiere Peau's glossary attributes the smell difference to chemistry: lower vanillin than V. planifolia, higher guaiacol, 4-methylguaiacol and vanillic acid. That claim is single-sourced from a trade glossary and the botany paper does not repeat it.

Usage in Perfumery

A base vanilla for work that needs a vanilla without the pastry. Use it where Bourbon vanilla would turn a composition edible. Premiere Peau names incense, vetiver and leather as its blending partners. Attested on 3 Fragrantica note listings and absent from Parfumo, so the term is real but small, and no supplier sells the extract.