About a city in the Alpes-Maritimes, the difference between a perfume and a candle scent – and why wine, of all things, is the most challenging and beautiful inspiration for both.
Anyone driving through the hills above Grasse early in the morning in May smells the city before they see it. It's a dense, almost oily scent, sweet and green at the same time, and it hangs in the air like mist. The roses are being harvested, Rosa centifolia, the May rose, and they are picked before sunrise because the essential oils evaporate in the warmth of the day. In August, the same ritual is repeated with jasmine. The flowers open at night. They must be harvested by eight in the morning.
Approximately eight thousand blossoms yield one kilogram of jasmine. One tonne of blossoms produces about one kilogram of absolute.
It's this calculation that explains why Grasse has remained an exception – and why we have our fragrances developed there, even though CUVÉE is a Düsseldorf-based brand, not one from the South of France.
How a City of Tanners Became the Capital of Perfume
For a long time, Grasse didn't smell good. In the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, the city was a center for leather processing. Tanneries need water, and there was plenty of it; they also need space to work with substances whose smell one wouldn't wish upon anyone. Grasse leather was known throughout Europe. As was its stench.
The turning point came through fashion. In the 16th century, perfumed gloves became a status symbol at European courts – gants parfumés. Their spread is often attributed to Catherine de Medici, who came from Florence to the French court and brought her own perfumer with her. Whether every detail of this anecdote is true is debatable among historians. The economic effect is not: The Grasse tanners began to perfume their leather and found that the surcharge for the fragrance was higher than the margin on the leather.
When taxes on leather increased in the 18th century and the fashion for gloves waned, what remained was what had proven to be the true skill. In 1747, Jean de Galimard founded his house, followed by Molinard in 1849, and Fragonard in 1926. The microclimate of the region – protected by the Prealps, open to the Mediterranean – proved ideal for jasmine, rose, tuberose, mimosa, orange blossom, and lavender. The city had found its second raw material.
In 2018, UNESCO included the perfume-related skills of the Pays de Grasse on the list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity: the cultivation of perfume plants, the knowledge of processing natural raw materials, and the art of fragrance composition. The order is noteworthy. What is protected is not a product, but a skill.
What Defines Grasse Today – and What Doesn't
Honesty is important here, because perfumery is a business that relies heavily on imagery.
A large portion of the raw materials used worldwide no longer comes from Grasse. Jasmine grows more cheaply in Egypt and India, roses in Turkey and Bulgaria, vetiver in Haiti, patchouli in Indonesia. The flower fields around Grasse have shrunk dramatically over the 20th century, displaced by land prices and the Côte d'Azur. Anyone who today speaks of a fragrance "from Grasse" and implies that every ingredient grew within sight of the city is telling a lovely story that isn't true.
What has truly remained in Grasse is more valuable and harder to replicate.
Firstly: the extraction methods. Classical enfleurage – flowers on layers of fat, for days, layer by layer – has virtually disappeared today, replaced by solvent extraction, which first produces a waxy concrete and then the pure absolute. But the knowledge of how a particular raw material reacts to a specific process, which batch of which vintage performs what, has been passed down through generations in Grasse.
Secondly: the training. The big houses maintain their own schools in the region. A perfumer trained there has spent several years blindly recognizing and naming thousands of individual substances before being allowed to write their first own formula. This is not creative training in the conventional sense. It's closer to music studies: first ear, then craft, then expression.
Thirdly: the density. In a city of around fifty thousand inhabitants, raw material traders, extraction companies, composition houses, and laboratories are located within a few kilometers. You can discuss an idea in the morning and smell three variations in the afternoon.
For us, this meant: We didn't seek out Grasse for a seal of origin. Rather, it was because the people who could answer a question that would otherwise have stumped us worked there.
The Question
It was, in its initial and very naive form: Can one translate a wine into a scent?
We didn't come to this question from perfumery. Two sisters, fascinated by fragrances, by wine culture, and by what a high-quality scented candle does to a room – that was all it was at first.
The observation from which CUVÉE originated was unspectacular: The evenings we remembered weren't the most elaborate. They were the ones where no one looked at the clock.
The occasion was never the wine. The occasion was to see each other. To talk, to eat together, to spend time that no one had previously scheduled – and sometimes that included sharing a glass of something special. The wine was part of these evenings, not their purpose. And scent was always there, but no one consciously perceived it.
Precisely therein lies the kinship that interested us. Wine is described like a perfume: with origin, structure, length, development in the glass. A winemaker and a perfumer work with the same vocabulary and the same sensory organ. What a person "tastes" when drinking wine is perceived to a very large extent retronasally – that is, through the nose. The rest is sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and a little texture.
A wine is to a large extent a fragrance. That was the starting point.
How We Even Got In
On January 1, 2022, we registered the name. The strategy was in place within a week. In retrospect, we were pleasantly clueless.
Because perfumery is a closed world. Those who come from outside, without industry history and without volume, simply don't get answers to many inquiries. The question that almost always came was: How many candles do you sell a year? For a company that didn't yet have a single product, there was no good answer to that. Minimum order quantities did the rest.
It took months. In the summer of 2022, there was a point where we were seriously disappointed. We then sat in Miriam's kitchen and decided to start all over again. In one of those rounds, we found the contact that changed everything.
We got a meeting. And we had a book with us.
It was a wine guide with the aroma wheels of the major grape varieties – those diagrams that break down which aromas characterize a Riesling, a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Sauvignon Blanc. That was our briefing: an aroma wheel from the wine book, open on a table – plus a color world for each of the four fragrances. Sauvignon Blanc was yellow and orange, warm and bright.
From the first idea to the finished product, a year and a half passed.
The Difference Between a Perfume and a Candle Scent
It took a while for us to understand how significant this difference is. It's why a candle scent cannot simply be a perfume in wax – and why many scented candles, even expensive ones, don't live up to their description.
The carrier. A perfume is dissolved in alcohol. Alcohol evaporates quickly and carries the fragrance molecules with it, which is why a perfume is so loud in the first few minutes. A candle has no alcohol. It has wax, and wax releases fragrance reluctantly. A fragrance oil must dissolve completely in the wax without sweating out or settling. Not every composition that works brilliantly on the skin can be transferred to a candle without adjustment.
The skin is missing. A perfume develops on a warm, slightly acidic, individually smelling body. The same formula smells different on two people. A candle has no carrier, no body heat, no chemistry at play. It stands in a room and must stand alone – and everything that would be rounded off by the skin in a perfume remains unprotected here.
Cold Throw and Hot Throw. A candle scent must work twice: cold, when someone takes off the lid and smells it, and hot, when the candle is burning. These are two completely different physical situations. Light, volatile molecules dominate the cold scent; in the warm wax pool, the heavier components come into play. How top, heart, and base notes interact is explained elsewhere. A composition that smells great cold and becomes flat hot is a standard problem – and one of the reasons why fragrance development for candles takes so long.
The flame changes everything. Fragrance oil burns with the wax. The flash point of the components, their behavior under heat, their tendency to produce soot – all of this sets limits for the composition that a perfume does not know. Vanillin, to name a common example, oxidizes and discolors wax yellowish over time. This can be avoided, but it must be known before finalizing a formula.
The wick. A fragrance oil that performs well in the lab can make a candle unburnable. The combination of wax, fragrance oil content, vessel diameter, and wick thickness determines whether a uniform wax pool forms or whether the candle tunnels, soots, or drowns. Secondly, they are forgiving. Small imperfections in the burn or a less complex composition are simply less noticeable with a warm, sweet note.
Regulation. The International Fragrance Association's standards categorize applications. A fine fragrance applied to the skin is subject to different limits than a candle without skin contact. This sounds like administration, but it has creative consequences: The toolkits overlap but are not identical.
If you take these six points together, you understand why a good candle scent doesn't come about in four weeks. And why we couldn't have developed it on our own.
The Toughest Task: Elegant Instead of Sweet
Of everything we learned during this time, this was the most unexpected.
The market for scented candles is predominantly sweet. Vanilla, caramel, cinnamon, tonka, pastry, warm gourmand notes. There are two sober reasons for this. First, sweet aroma chemicals are comparatively inexpensive to purchase and very assertive – they fill a room quickly and reliably. Second, they are forgiving. Small imperfections in the burn or a less complex composition are simply less noticeable with a warm, sweet note.
So, sweet is not wrong. Sweet is simply the safe choice.
We didn't want that, and we underestimated how difficult the alternative is. Because what is considered elegant in perfumery works through restraint: through a dry base, through structure instead of richness, through notes that recede and thus leave space. Cedarwood, vetiver, pepper, iris, a green accord. These substances are more difficult to dose, more expensive, and they forgive nothing. In a room, they can quickly seem thin or – even worse – smell like nothing.
During our development, there were several samples that we returned because they leaned in the same direction: too soft, too round, too pleasing. Each time, the temptation was great to leave it at that. No one would have disliked it.
But a scent that no one dislikes also won't be remembered by anyone.
The compromise we ultimately found is not in the middle, but in the construction: a perceptible, inviting fruitiness in the opening, supported by a base that is significantly drier than one would expect after the first few seconds. Chardonnay is our softest scent and still has a powdery, almost tart roundness instead of a vanilla cushion. Cabernet Sauvignon introduces cassis and immediately counters it with pepper and cedarwood.
The effect is easy to describe: You still smell the scent after two hours – but you no longer smell it on you. It has become part of the room. That's exactly what a scent in a home should achieve.
Why Wine is the Perfect Inspiration – and Why Our Candles Don't Smell Like Wine
This distinction is more important to us than any other, which is why it is explained in detail here.
Wine and perfume actually share molecules. This is not a marketing gimmick, but chemistry – and it was one of the perfumers who first explained this to us.
The grassy, green bell pepper note in Sauvignon Blanc and in young Cabernet Sauvignon comes from methoxypyrazines – the same group of compounds that gives green bell pepper its typical smell and is used in perfumery to build green accords. The grapefruit and gooseberry nuances in Sauvignon Blanc are due to sulfur-containing compounds, one of which is also responsible for the smell of blackcurrant bud – whose absolute is a highly valued and expensive raw material in perfumery. Riesling owes its clarity to, among other things, linalool and geraniol; linalool is found in lavender and bergamot, geraniol in rose and geranium. The peach note in Chardonnay comes from lactones, which peaches themselves also contain, and the creamy texture from malolactic fermentation and aging in wood.
A winemaker and a perfumer not only speak a similar language. They sometimes work with the same compounds.
Precisely for this reason, a grape variety is such a precise template. When we talked to the perfumers about Riesling, we didn't have to say "fresh." We could talk about acid structure, about the tension between lime and green apple, about the floral softness that a jasmine blossom contrasts.
What we never wanted was a scent that smelled like wine.
For one, that would be unpleasant. Wine in a glass doesn't just smell of fruit. It smells of alcohol, yeast, fermentation, and in unfavorable cases, sulfur or acetic acid. A room that smells like that doesn't feel cultivated, but rather like the morning after.
Secondly, it would diminish the idea. Wine interests us not as a beverage, but as a culture: as craftsmanship, as origin, as time, as an occasion to open a bottle and sit down. Translating this part is the real task.
Our candles are therefore inspired by the aromas of noble grape varieties – not their literal depiction. What you smell is not Chardonnay. It is the evening when it was on the table.
Four Grape Varieties, Four Compositions
Riesling – Lime, green apple, jasmine blossom. The clearest scent in the collection. For bright rooms and quiet mornings.
Sauvignon Blanc – Grapefruit, gooseberry, honeydew melon. Lively, with a tropical edge. The most sociable of the four.
Chardonnay – Pineapple, white peach, vanilla. Creamy and powdery, with a depth that only reveals itself after a while. Our scent for evenings that are worth it.
Cabernet Sauvignon – Cassis, colorful pepper, cedarwood. The deepest and most structured. Autumn and winter, long table, late conversation.
All four are developed in collaboration with perfumers in Grasse, with perfume-grade ingredients, and are hand-poured in Europe from a sustainable soy wax blend. 250 grams, approx. 55 hours burn time, cotton wick, ceramic vessel. The four scents of the collection at a glance.
What remains
There's a sentence we measure every decision by: People don't remember scents. They remember moments.
This isn't a gesture of modesty towards our own product. It's a description of how olfactory perception works. The sense of smell is more closely linked to the brain regions for emotion and memory than any other sense. That's why a scent can trigger a memory before you can name it. And that's why later, you won't remember the fragrance note, but the room, the people, the light.
The detour via Grasse, the months of development, the returned samples: all of this serves a single goal. To make an evening a success. When someone at the end of the evening asks what's actually burning, that's the most beautiful moment for us. And if your guests later remember not the fragrance note, but the evening itself – then both were right: the candle and the host.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean for a fragrance to be created in Grasse?
Grasse in Southern France has been considered the world capital of perfume since the 18th century; in 2018, UNESCO recognized its perfume-related skills as intangible cultural heritage. When a fragrance is created in Grasse, it means that the composition – i.e., the formula itself – was developed there in collaboration with trained perfumers. The raw materials now come from all over the world; the expertise has remained in Grasse.
How does a candle fragrance differ from a perfume?
A perfume is dissolved in alcohol and develops on the skin. A candle fragrance must dissolve in wax without separating, must work both cold and hot (cold throw and hot throw), must withstand combustion, and must not disrupt the burning process. Therefore, a formula cannot simply be transferred from one medium to another.
Do CUVÉE candles smell like wine?
No. They are inspired by the aromas of noble grape varieties, not by wine as a beverage. Wine also smells of alcohol, yeast, and fermentation – which would be unpleasant in a room. The characteristic aromatic notes of a grape variety are translated, such as cassis and pepper in Cabernet Sauvignon.
Why do many scented candles smell sweet?
Sweet aromatic substances are comparatively inexpensive, very dominant, and mask weaknesses in the wax and burn. Elegant, dry compositions with wood, spice, or green notes are more difficult to dose and more expensive, but in return, they are less obtrusive in the room and remain interesting for longer.
What are cold throw and hot throw?
Cold throw describes how a candle smells when unlit, while hot throw describes how intensely and balanced it fills the room while burning. Both are carried by different components of the composition and must be developed separately.
How much fragrance oil is in a high-quality scented candle?
For soy wax, the usual proportion is about eight to ten percent. A higher proportion does not automatically improve the scent – it can cause the oil to separate, the candle to soot, or not burn cleanly.
Where are CUVÉE candles made?
The fragrances are created in collaboration with perfumers in Grasse. The candles are hand-poured in Europe using a sustainable soy wax blend. The brand is run as a family business from Düsseldorf.
Sources and Further Reading
- UNESCO, Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: The skills related to perfume in Pays de Grasse, inscribed 2018
- International Fragrance Association: IFRA Standards
- Ribéreau-Gayon et al., Handbook of Enology, Vol. 2 – The Chemistry of Wine
- Jean-Claude Ellena, Der Parfumeur
