Voyageurs

Spathe’s Voyageurs one of the most unexpected fragrances I've ever encountered and I love it a lot. It's strange to me, mixing the kitchen/gourmet experiences of the festival with its environment, but it works so well. Festival du Voyageur is a ten-day outdoor/indoor lineup of parties, community events, concerts and other winter activities to celebrate francophone and Métis culture and history in and around Winnipeg and the province at large. It’s held smack in the middle of February every year, and despite a lot of it being hosted outside in the prairie wind and snow, it’s a heartwarming experience for a lot of people. Voyageurs lists stewing vegetables like you'd find in a settlement kitchen (or modern Métis or French-Canadian kitchen) being prepped for tourtière. I immediately pick up crunchy raw celery (just as photorealistic as it is in Monsillage’s Eau de Céleri—another Canadian independent perfumery), but I'm positive I can also smell sweet, rooty carrots, dry bay leaf laurel, flat leaf parsley and just a touch of cracked black pepper. (But I wonder how much of that is my own scent memories embellishing things.) There’s a sweet maple syrup inclusion that doesn’t overwhelm, instead it's a shining, bright, thread through the whole fragrance, pulling sweetness from the vegetal notes and glowing resinous tones from pine, even polishing up the drier wood notes evocative of the historic, wooden Fort Gibraltar festival setting. Voyageurs easily evokes the experience of attending a modern festival with delicious food, traditional fiddling and dancing, spectacular snow and ice sculptures, and tobogganing and snowshoeing excursions. It just as easily bridges the gap between this year’s festival-goers and the experiences of voyageurs long ago, deep in Canada's boreal forests, working for a fur trade company where they worked and sheltered from the same biting winter winds, playing fiddle music and dancing in celebrations, and cooking and enjoying the same kinds of savoury-sweet foods in the depths of mid-winter. It’s artful and interesting and if you’re able, this is something you should try for yourself.