Remy Latour Perfumes & Colognes

The fragrance is called Cigar, and for once the name is not a metaphor.

A small French house, a very direct idea

Rémy Latour is a French fragrance company of the sort that does not advertise, does not run boutiques, and is known almost entirely through one product. Cigar launched in the mid-1990s and has been quietly selling ever since, mostly by word of mouth among people looking for tobacco in a bottle.

Brands like this are the working part of the fragrance industry. No archive, no couture connection — just a decent formula that found its audience and stayed in production for thirty years, which many far more famous launches did not manage.

What it actually smells like

Warm tobacco leaf, honey, spice and a dry woody base, with a faint sweetness holding it together. It reads as a cigar lounge rather than a lit cigar — sweet dried leaf and old wood, not ash.

It is worth being specific, because tobacco fragrances split into two camps and people are often disappointed by the wrong one. This is the sweet, cosy sort. If you want the bitter, smoky sort, look at Quorum instead.

Two sizes, and the season

1.7 oz and 3.4 oz. This is unmistakably a cold-weather fragrance — in summer heat the sweetness turns heavy fast. From October onward it is one of the best-value things on the site, and it costs a fraction of the well-known tobacco fragrances it is regularly compared to.

It is in men’s cologne, near Maurer & Wirtz, whose Tabac takes the same raw material in a completely different direction.