Juniper

Fresh, resinous and coniferous, with a peppery, spicy dryness and a hint of gin.

Common juniper, Juniperus communis, is a conifer in the cypress family. It has the largest range of any woody plant: around the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere it grows from beyond the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Scandinavia and Siberia to the Himalayas and the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. It usually stays a low, spreading shrub and only rarely becomes a small tree of around ten metres. The berries for the essential oil come mostly from wild stands in south-eastern Europe, such as the Balkans and the Adriatic coast, and from Italy.

Juniper is dioecious: only female shrubs bear the berry cones. They start out green and take around a year and a half – by some accounts up to three years – to ripen to blue-black with a waxy bloom. Only the ripe cones are harvested. The essential oil is obtained by steam distillation of the ripe, unfermented berries. The yield is low: the berries contain about 1 to 3% essential oil.

Juniper usually sits in the top note and reaches into the heart of a fragrance. Its highly volatile monoterpenes create a clear, cool opening – resinous, needle-like and with the typical association of gin. In aromatic, fresh-woody and fougère compositions it bridges citrus notes with woods and spices, lending them a dry, bracing freshness. In our range, juniper appears in 55 fragrances, 37 of them in the top note and 18 in the heart.

Aromatic · Woody (coniferous) · Top note

The berry cones take around a year and a half or longer to ripen; only the ripe, blue-black cones are harvested. The distilled berry oil is available to perfumery all year round.

In our fragrances, it often appears alongside Bergamotte, Vetiver, Moschus, Zedernholz, rosa Pfeffer, Amber, Vanille.

Medieval healers already knew wine with juniper as a remedy; around 1270 the Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant described juniper berries boiled in wine as a medicine. In the Netherlands, juniper spirit became genever – long before its invention around 1650 was attributed to the Leiden physician Franciscus Sylvius. After William III of Orange became King of England in 1689, the juniper spirit grew popular there, and “genever” became “gin”. In the kitchen, the berries still season game and sauerkraut, above all in central and northern Europe.

• The word gin goes back to juniper: French “genièvre” became Dutch “genever”, which the English shortened to “gin”.
• In the Alps juniper is also called Kranewitt – from Old High German kranawitu, probably meaning “crane wood”; the fieldfare, which loves the berries, was once named Krammetsvogel after them.
• Juniper is dioecious: there are male and female shrubs, and only the female ones bear “berries” – the wind carries the pollen from shrub to shrub.

The essential oil of the berry cones consists mostly of monoterpene hydrocarbons. The main constituent is usually α-pinene (C₁₀H₁₆, PubChem CID 6654) – around 20 to 50% in analyses – accompanied by myrcene (C₁₀H₁₆, CID 31253) and limonene (C₁₀H₁₆, CID 22311). All three are isomers with the same molecular formula but a different structure. Among the less volatile sesquiterpenes, germacrene D (C₁₅H₂₄, CID 5317570) stands out. The exact composition varies considerably with origin and harvest year.