A pair of sixteenth century kid leather gloves, a glass plate spread with fat in a wooden frame, and eight thousand jasmine flowers weighing exactly one kilogram. Those three objects sum up four hundred years of Grasse, a hill town some twenty kilometres north of Cannes. This piece reads Grasse as a chain of raw materials, from flower field to extraction plant.
Scented gloves
Tanned leather has a smell of its own, and not a pleasant one. Grasse lived first from wool cloth, then in the sixteenth century turned to tanning, shoemaking and glove making. Scented gloves were in fashion among the European nobility, and a pair of gloves needed another smell laid over the leather. The first records of perfumery in Grasse date from the same period.
In 1614 the glovers of Paris won the monopoly on making and selling scented extracts, and the title gantier parfumeur, glover and perfumer, came into use. More than a century later, in 1724, Grasse founded its own perfumers' guild, separate from the glovers, just as the leather trade began to decline. The scent had separated from the object that carried it.
A story often told says that Queen Catherine de' Medici brought perfumery to Grasse. The Fragonard perfume museum notes that no record shows she ever visited. The real history of Grasse is less romantic: a town with leather, water and sunny hillsides, slowly learning to turn flowers into goods.
The flower fields around the town
Flowers do not travel well. A jasmine flower or a rose petal must reach the factory within three to four hours of picking. So in Grasse the factories always stood near the fields, and each village around the town was once tied to one plant: orange blossom in Vallauris and Le Bar-sur-Loup, violet in Tourrettes-sur-Loup, rose in La Colle-sur-Loup, geranium in Pégomas.
The regional calendar covers most of the year. Mimosa flowers in February on the Tanneron massif, the largest mimosa area in France. Bitter orange blossom opens in spring. The May rose, as its name says, is picked in May. Violet leaves are cut twice, in May and August. Tuberose flowers in summer from bulbs planted in spring. Jasmine is picked from July to October. Iris rhizomes are lifted after three years, then dried for another two to three years.
The area has shrunk a great deal. In the 1920s the Pays de Grasse held roughly 1,200 to 1,500 hectares of flowers. Today about 40 to 80 hectares remain. What Grasse keeps more of than land is craft: which flower is picked at which hour, how quickly it must be processed, and how many kilograms of petals one kilogram of extract requires.
May rose and Grasse jasmine
The May rose, rose de mai, is Rosa × centifolia, a many petalled hybrid whose Latin name means one hundred leaves. Its flower structure does not suit the still, so centifolia is extracted almost only with solvents. About 800 kilograms of flowers are needed for one kilogram of absolute. In the finished material, phenylethyl alcohol dominates at about 65 to 73 percent, giving a fresh, slightly honeyed rose.
Grasse jasmine is Jasminum grandiflorum. The flowers are picked at dawn and the picking must end before noon. About eight thousand flowers weigh one kilogram. The scent is built from benzyl acetate, benzyl benzoate, linalool and a small share of indole, about 0.7 to 3.5 percent, usually described as the source of jasmine's warm, faintly animal edge. The IFRA maximum skin level for jasmine is 0.7 percent.
Two figures show how jasmine has moved. In 1930 Grasse picked around 1,800 tonnes. By 2011 the figure was about 20 tonnes, most of it from a single family. From the 1970s and 1980s, most of the world's jasmine moved to Egypt and India, and Grasse jasmine today costs about 20 to 30 percent more than jasmine from those two countries.
Tuberose, Polianthes tuberosa, shows the limits of yield. About 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of flowers are needed for one kilogram of absolute. Its dense, sweet, milky smell comes from methyl benzoate, benzyl alcohol and methyl anthranilate.
The raw material houses
From the mid nineteenth century Grasse built real factories: fifteen between 1860 and 1910. Firms here gradually stopped selling finished goods and made concentrated extracts for other perfume houses instead. That is the model of the raw material house: a factory that needs no name on the bottle, only a name in the order book.
The list of Grasse born houses reads like a timeline. Galimard gives 1747. Chiris 1768. Charabot 1817. Roure 1820, merged with Givaudan in 1991. Molinard 1849. Robertet 1850, still family owned. Payan Bertrand 1854. Mane 1871, in Le Bar-sur-Loup. Fragonard, founded in 1926, is a perfume house with a museum. Some houses have merged into larger groups; some keep their names.
In the early twentieth century, these houses no longer waited for flowers to reach Grasse. They opened plants in Lebanon, Egypt and Réunion, then in Madagascar, the Comoros and Java. After 1950, synthetics and cheaper flowers from elsewhere slowly turned Grasse from a growing region into an aromatic industry cluster. The route from Grasse to the islands of the Indian Ocean continues in Madagascar · Vanilla, Clove, Ylang Ylang.
The mergers have clear milestones. In 1967 Chiris was sold to Universal Oil Products. In 1991 Roure joined Givaudan. When the Absolue Pays de Grasse indication was created, the first seven processors to join were Firmenich, Jean Gazignaire, IFF-LMR, Mane, Payan Bertrand, Robertet and Sotraflor, about 90 percent of the processing plants in the zone. The names over the factory gates have changed many times; the position of the factories beside the flower fields has not.
Fat and flowers in the history of Grasse
Fat absorbs scent and holds it for a long time. Before volatile solvents, this was the main way to take scent from flowers that could not survive the still. According to a documentation sheet from the town of Grasse, cold enfleurage appeared here around 1750, for fragile flowers such as orange blossom, jasmine and tuberose.
The main tool is the chassis: a glass plate in a wooden frame, both sides spread with a thin layer of fat refined to have no smell of its own. Flowers are laid on the fat and the frames are stacked. After about a day the old flowers are removed and fresh ones laid down, again and again for weeks until the fat is saturated. Jasmine and tuberose suit this method because they keep releasing scent after picking. The final scented fat is called a pomade, and it is washed with alcohol to draw out the aromatic part.
In 1898 the house of Chiris built a volatile solvent extraction plant in Grasse; the 4,582 square metre building opened in 1899 and was nicknamed la Mosquée. One kilogram of concrete, the scented wax left once the solvent has evaporated, replaced about one hundred kilograms of pomade. Over the twentieth century concrete gradually replaced fat, and the glass frame method now survives mostly in museums. Four ways of taking scent from flowers are set side by side in Four Ways to Take Scent from a Flower.
Grasse today
A name can carry legal meaning. In November 2020 the French Institute of Industrial Property approved the geographical indication Absolue Pays de Grasse, France's tenth for an industrial or craft product rather than a food. To carry the name, flowers must be grown within the defined zone, covering parts of the Alpes-Maritimes, Var and Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, and extracted with volatile solvents, with fat, or with supercritical CO2.
Two years earlier, on 28 November 2018, UNESCO inscribed the skills related to perfume in the Pays de Grasse on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: growing perfume plants, knowing and processing natural raw materials, and the art of composing perfume. The same year, the mayor of Grasse set aside 70 hectares of land for perfume crops.
A new generation of growers has returned, often tied to a single perfume house. The Mul family in Pégomas has grown flowers exclusively for Chanel since 1987. The farms Domaine de Manon and Clos de Callian sell their entire harvest to Dior. In 2019 the aromatic industry of the Alpes-Maritimes and Monaco counted about 11,330 jobs, with about 80 percent of output exported.
Grasse today remains home to factories, laboratories and training schools. The world's flowers pass through it, even though most no longer grow there. The Grasse page in the library records the flower calendar, the list of raw material houses and the conditions of the geographical indication.
The gloves needed a scent. The scent needed a field.
The field grew smaller. The craft stayed.
A town remembered for what it knows how to do.