Green Grape Beer
A beautiful green grape opening that quickly turns into something I have absolutely no desire to smell like.
I purchased this product with my own money from luckyscent.com.
The Backstory
Green grape is one of my favorite fruit scents. I particularly enjoy it in Yves Saint Laurent’s In Love Again, so when I came across Villa Erbatium Green Grape Beer, I was immediately interested.
It’s a difficult fragrance to sample locally. I could have exercised some restraint and ordered a sample from LuckyScent, but the full bottle seemed like a reasonable gamble, so I blind bought it.
I had high hopes. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the second half of the name.
Composition & Notes
Green Grape Beer is a South Korean eau de parfum built around green grape, green apple, aldehydes, and white lager. Villa Erbatium describes a sparkling fruity opening, a beer accord that adds balance, and a drydown of white musk and dry woods.
The opening is beautiful. Bright green grape has a sparkling, slightly fizzy aldehydic quality that immediately made me think I’d found exactly what I wanted.
But the beer soon takes over. And I don’t mean a subtle fermented nuance or an abstract boozy accord. I mean very realistic beer, with a sweetness that reminds me of the flavoring used to make children’s medicine more palatable.
The green grape becomes secondary, leaving me with something somewhere between sweet beer and cough syrup.
The Experience
If the opening lasted throughout the wear, I’d probably love this. Instead, I find myself wishing the fragrance would stay in that first, sparkling moment.
The beer is so convincing that wearing it makes me feel as though I smell like I’ve been drinking. It’s not a smell I particularly want on myself.
I don’t hate the composition, and I can appreciate how unusual and literal the concept is. The bottle is pretty, too. But with plenty of other fragrances to choose from, this is one I never reach for.
I simply don’t want to smell like I’ve been drinking beer and eating candy.
Final Words
Green Grape Beer succeeds in making its unusual concept recognizable. The beer accord is impressively realistic, and the opening shows how beautiful green grape can be in a fragrance. Unfortunately, those qualities don’t add up to something I want to wear.
If you’re specifically looking for a realistic beer scent with fruity sweetness and aldehydic sparkle, it may be exactly what you’re after. If you’re here for the green grape, I’d pass.
I don’t hate it. I just have absolutely no desire to wear it, which is a fairly significant problem for a perfume.
