Sage

Herbaceous, fresh and slightly camphoraceous, with a dry, spicy-bitter depth.

Common sage is an evergreen subshrub with woody stems and grey-green, felty leaves that grows to around 60 centimetres. Its home is the Mediterranean; wild stands grow above all on the coasts and islands of the Adriatic and Ionian seas and inland in the southern Balkans. Because Dalmatian sage is regarded as the classic quality, the oil is often traded as “Dalmatian sage oil”. Today Albania is an important supplying and growing country. Clary sage (Salvia sclarea) is a separate species of the same genus; it comes from southern Europe and is grown in larger plantations specifically for perfumery.

For the essential oil, the leaves of common sage, usually together with stems and other aerial parts, are dried and distilled with water or steam. The yield is low: the leaves contain only around 1 to 2.5% essential oil. Which molecules dominate depends strongly on origin, plant population and harvest time; the quality of the oil is judged mainly by the ratio of thujone to camphor. Clary sage oil is distilled as well. Its most valuable companion substance, sclareol, sits mainly in glandular hairs on the flower calyces.

Sage brings a herbaceous, fresh, slightly camphoraceous note to compositions and gives them the dry, aromatic clarity typical of herbal and aromatic accords. Because its main constituents are light monoterpenes, it works above all in the opening and the heart. Clary sage smells softer, tea-like and slightly ambery; it is mostly used as a supporting note. In our range, sage appears in 33 fragrances, 17 in the top and 16 in the heart note.

Aromatic · Herbal · Top and heart note

Both the dried herb and the distilled oil store well, so sage oil is available all year round.

In our fragrances, it often appears alongside Zedernholz, Bergamotte, Amber, Patschuli, Moschus, Sandelholz, Vanille.

Sage has accompanied people in the Mediterranean since antiquity. In the 1st century AD the Latin name Salvia appears in Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder. Around 800, Charlemagne's estate ordinance, the “Capitulare de villis”, lists sage among the plants to be grown in the gardens of the imperial estates, and it became a fixture of monastery gardens. In the 9th century, Walafrid Strabo, abbot of Reichenau, opened his didactic poem on the monastery garden, the “Hortulus”, with sage. In 16th-century Germany, wine was flavoured with clary sage and elderflowers to imitate the taste of muscatel – hence its German name, Muskatellersalbei. In 2023, common sage was named Medicinal Plant of the Year in Germany.

• The name Salvia goes back to the Latin “salvus” – healthy, whole, unharmed.
• A medieval verse associated with the school of Salerno asks: “Cur moriatur homo, cui salvia crescit in horto?” – “Why should a man die who has sage growing in his garden?”
• Clary sage was called “clear-eye” in English and “Oculus Christi” in Latin: its mucilaginous seeds were once used to lift foreign bodies out of the eye.

The essential oil of common sage is shaped by bicyclic monoterpenes: α- and β-thujone (both C₁₀H₁₆O), camphor (C₁₀H₁₆O) and 1,8-cineole (C₁₀H₁₈O, PubChem CID 2758). The international standard ISO 9909 for Dalmatian sage oil gives ranges of 18 to 43% α-thujone, 3 to 8.5% β-thujone, 4.5 to 24.5% camphor and 5.5 to 13% 1,8-cineole. How much the composition varies is shown by analyses of wild populations, in which the proportions differ markedly from site to site. Clary sage is quite different: its oil is carried by linalyl acetate (C₁₂H₂₀O₂, PubChem CID 8294) and linalool (C₁₀H₁₈O). It also forms the diterpene alcohol sclareol (C₂₀H₃₆O₂), which is produced in the glandular hairs of the flower calyces and is the most important starting material for making ambroxide, a central molecule of ambergris-like scent notes.