Folkwinds: Where Old Perfumes Hide Inside New Ones

The plan for Smuggler's Notch, an early Folkwinds perfume, reads like a farm inventory: Vermont Honeycrisp apples, red spruce, sugar maple, orris root from around 1950. Cigars and dark malted barley sat on the same list. What Jono Bornstein meant to do with them is the strange part. Some were to be blended before they were ever extracted, then distilled into the perfume, and laid underneath it again as an extract he brewed at home from the same materials. “My goal is unity,” he wrote.

Bornstein founded Folkwinds in 2022 to highlight North American made aromatic materials, designs and artwork, and he is both its artistic director and its nose. The idea behind that list has a name, closed-loop perfumery, which he traces to Indian attars: materials grown together, extracted together, then blended together.

Blueberries fermented with bubblegum

His first three perfumes already leaned on extracts made from two things at once. Cloud Illusions, a day spent dreaming and a hike in blue wind, was built on Maine blueberries fermented together with Hubba Bubba bubblegum. Santi Ana, an East Coast autumn with a cider donut in hand, used Vermont apple cider extracted together with sandalwood.

Smuggler's Notch was the first perfume built whole on the idea, and the original Jasper no Kodō the second. That one was all natural: blackberries, copal, cultivated kinam and palo santo pulled out together in a single extraction. Blue lotus farmed in Kentucky went into the same run.

Three passes at the same mountains

Jasper no Kodō is the flagship, the North Star of the house, named for Jasper National Park and begun as an attempt to put the Canadian Rockies in a bottle. It is his favourite perfume, and he keeps travelling back to the park.

The second version moved the scene to an alpine meadow above a glacial lake, where you stop for a Kodō ceremony with the agarwood you carried up. Everything was turned up with it, more blackberries and more oud above all, and part of its price at the house went to help the community of Jasper recover from wildfire.

On skin it is fruit and conifer in the same moment, crushed blackberry against cold fir, copal and palo santo giving the air its incense. The agarwood comes up through cool, watery florals and stays late, and it carries further than the other three here.

The third came after a year of listening to the people who wore the second, and he rebuilt it from the ground up for clarity, calmer and cooler and less fruit-forward. He composes alone, and his own perfumes become too familiar to him, so he takes weeks off a formula at a time to smell it with any objectivity. The summer before, he glissaded the Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt, and the thyme and wildflowers along it, and the blue-walled crevasse he fell into, fed the rebuild.

Mist sliding across a turquoise glacial lake at first light. Juniper and blackberry over hemlock and century-old fir, cold and resinous. Green agarwood takes the middle, mountain thyme in it, and the base reads as altitude. It is the most daylight-friendly thing the house makes, built for cold clear days and high places.

When a finished perfume becomes an ingredient

Jasper 27 was a birthday gift to himself: the very last grams of the original Jasper no Kodō, suspended in pure Cloud Illusions.

Jasper 28 came the next birthday and stripped everything away: the remnants of that Jasper extraction, a few simpler and better materials, nothing else. “Strip back needless complication and bloat,” he wrote.

Jasper 29: Maligne Lake Blue began with a client who only ever wore Jasper no Kodō and Maligne Blue layered together. He tried it, agreed, and tinkered until the two were one.

At Folkwinds a finished perfume is just another raw material. Jasper XXX, named for his favourite memory of his thirty years, lists Jasper no Kodo among its own base notes.

The apple and tobacco idea, three years later

Crimson and Clover is where the idea from the house's first year ended up, a stylistic evolution of Santi Ana and Smuggler's Notch with three years of lessons poured into the formula. Of all the tobacco perfumes he has put out, it is the one he was most excited to share.

One line in its base reads simply Smuggler's Notch: the house's first closed-loop perfume, now a material inside this one, its deer musk, Vermont spruce and maple laid under the apple.

Fruit and wood: Crimson and Clover

It opens boozy, cider and boiled cranberries with clove and ginger biting through. Green tobacco and hay follow, sweet clover humming under them. The drydown is sugar maple and Vietnamese oud over castoreum and aged Mongolian musk, warm and a little animal. It keeps changing all evening, and it is made for the cold half of the year, for wood fires and wool.

An orris blizzard on sandalwood

Midwinter Storm puts one material in the centre and takes it as far as it will go: an orris soliflore, wave after wave of white powdered orris, a midwinter blizzard of the stuff.

Underneath it, two decisions. Orris usually gets benzoin for company, powder on powder, and he put the most gourmand sandalwoods he could find there instead. Two of the agarwoods are callbacks, the purple-tinged Thai from The Wonderland II and the same Malinau that gave Maligne Blue its heart, with a silver tigerwood new to the house beside them.

Powder as weight: Midwinter Storm

A crack of ice cider and rye spice through white spruce, and then the orris arrives in full, starchy and cool. The drydown is deep and close, oud and sandalwood gone resinous and skin-warm. Formal evenings in the coldest, darkest months, powder worn as weight.

Caps built to outlast the perfume

The bottle gets the same attention as what goes in it. The caps are solid machined metal, the patches leather vegetable-tanned in the USA, and every part is meant to outlast the perfume inside it. The Black Label bottles got hand-torched solid copper caps. For the third Jasper he coated five bronze caps in glacial blue and promised whoever pulled one a hand in the first Folkwinds community fragrance.

At this writing nearly every perfume on the house's own shop is marked sold out. Gouttes Rares pours Folkwinds in 1, 2, 5 and 10 ml, on the Folkwinds decants page.

Frequently asked questions

Who makes Folkwinds?

Jono Bornstein, who founded the house in 2022 to highlight North American made aromatic materials, designs and artwork. He is both its artistic director and its nose, and the perfumes are scent-scapes of North America built mostly from natural, American-sourced materials.

What does Jasper no Kodō mean?

Jasper is Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies, the place the perfume set out to capture and the park Bornstein keeps going back to. Kodō is the ceremony in the second version's own scene: an alpine meadow above a glacial lake, and a break to burn the agarwood you carried up with you.

What is the difference between Jasper No Kodo 2 and Jasper no Kodō III?

They are the second and third versions of the same flagship. Jasper No Kodo 2 is the louder one, with more blackberry and more oud, and it lasts 10 to 12 hours with enormous sillage. Jasper no Kodō III was rebuilt for clarity after a year of feedback, calmer, cooler and less fruit-forward, and it lasts 8 to 10 hours with strong sillage.

Is Folkwinds perfume natural?

Mostly. Folkwinds works primarily in natural, American-sourced materials and leans on rare ones such as floral absolutes and sandalwood, and the original Jasper no Kodō was all natural. The Folkwinds decants at Gouttes Rares are predominantly natural materials.

Where can I try Folkwinds?

At Gouttes Rares, in 1, 2, 5 and 10 ml: Jasper no Kodō III and Jasper No Kodo 2, with Crimson and Clover and Midwinter Storm sold out at this writing. The Folkwinds decants collection also holds Through the Looking Glass, Devil's Garden and So Long, Honey.