Montale
Montale
888 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The bitter orange hits like biting into a chocolate orange segment, that specific moment where citrus oil and dark chocolate meet on your tongue. Dried fruits cluster around the edges—dates, figs, prunes—adding a sticky, concentrated sweetness that's almost treacly, whilst the orange peel maintains its crystallised bite against the encroaching richness.
The cocoa unfurls properly now, alkaline and dusty with that characteristic bitter edge that quality chocolate has before it melts. It's less about eating chocolate and more about the experience of working with it—tempering, melting, that warm cocoa-scented air that clings to everything. The powdery quality intensifies, creating a soft-focus effect around the more defined chocolate notes.
Bourbon vanilla takes over with a creamy, almost custardy presence that finally smooths the bitter edges into something rounded and complete. The synthetic quality becomes more apparent here, a clean sweetness that sits on the skin like a second skin rather than something entirely natural. What remains is a powdery vanilla-cocoa hybrid, the ghost of expensive chocolate lingering on your fingers hours after you've finished the bar.
Chocolate Greedy is Montale's unabashed love letter to the confectionery counter, a fragrance that smells precisely like cracking open a bar of expensive dark chocolate studded with candied orange peel. The bitter orange in the opening cuts through with a crystallised sweetness, that distinctive flavour of peel cooked in syrup until it's both sharp and sugary, whilst dried fruits add a figgy, pruned density that prevents this from veering into milk chocolate territory. The cocoa here is the real star—dusty, alkaline, and authentically bitter, like quality couverture before the sugar's been mixed in. It's that moment when you dip your nose into a tin of Dutch-processed cocoa powder and get hit with both the richness and the astringency. The bourbon vanilla arrives with enough heft to smooth everything into something genuinely edible-smelling, but there's a persistent powdery quality throughout, like icing sugar suspended in the air of a chocolatier's kitchen. That synthetic accord? It reads as the clean, climate-controlled environment of a modern chocolate shop rather than a rustic kitchen—all polished surfaces and precise temperatures. This is for the gourmand devotee who doesn't want their dessert fragrances prettified or made wearable through florals or woods. It's bold, unapologetic, and smells expensive in that specific way that artisan chocolate shops do. Winter fragrance, certainly, but more specifically: the scent of deliberate indulgence on a grey afternoon.
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3.6/5 (186)