Corsica - Baiser de la Mer Birkholz 2024

Summer in a bottle.
I wanted to add nothing more and nothing less to my manageable fragrance portfolio.
Can't be that difficult, I thought to myself. I know what I like,
i thought to myself...
Well, to summarize, I must see my search as a path to knowledge: Because I have realized that there are obviously many more fragrance nuances that I do NOT like, i.e. those that I would like to perceive on and around me over a period of several hours, on several days, ideally spread over several months and years. (Congratulations to all conquerors of this sentence monster.)
Many really good and undoubtedly well-made creations crossed my nose. It was often just little things that made me sigh "hmjanöirgendwiednoch" at the end of the day.

Torino 21, for example. Good, fresh, but a bit too much mint, thank you.
Uden? Hach...yeah no...it's too citrusy at the start.
Oltremare perhaps? Oh, tea - great. But not this tea.
Ok, then another tea? Wulong Cha?
Yes, but no. It's missing no idea what, but it's missing.
Erba Gold - too fruity.
Acqua di Sale - is that sage? No? I think it smells like sage.
(By the way, I'm not linking the fragrances because I don't want to, but because it's not working right now.)
Imagination, Renaissance, Greenley, all good to very good, but still not what I was looking for. My nose is obviously a bitch.

But long story long, while browsing through the reviews I stumbled across Birkholz's Corsica at some point. I had already been there, it was great back then.
Sighted the fragrance notes, got curious.
Top notes with the classics bergamot and lime, plus mint and violet leaf. So far, so good. Reads like 90% of all summer refreshes at first.
Heart notes of lavender and rosemary. I like that, ok. Plus plum (drawing in air through my teeth, I hear myself thinking "uh, could be too sweet") and ... Sea salt? All right, they want to evoke aquatic associations, let's give them a break.
Base notes moss, musk, sandalwood.
No experiments. Sounds solid.

So I ordered an original fragrance sample from Birkholz (and received 6 more), took a deep sniff after the first evaporation on my arm and thought "Wow! That's a good one."
Second sniff: "It's really good! I hope it doesn't tip in any direction that I don't like again."

It didn't. Hooray! What I smelled was a feather-light, fresh, non-pungent citrus with barely perceptible but still present mint. No in-your-face freshness that screams so loudly until the last person realizes that it's supposed to be a summer fragrance. Perhaps it is also the very slight sweetness of the plum that rounds it all off. However, if I didn't know it was there, I wouldn't recognize it. Fortunately.
The fragrance doesn't change much later on. None of the ingredients push themselves rudely to the fore. The citrus fruits quietly fade away at some point, but continue to beckon on the horizon until the end. Musk and sandalwood gently cream my nostrils.
Sea salt? Moss? Hmm, difficult. Could be that they were there. But in the end I don't care, because all in all this is the summer fragrance I've been looking for for so long.

I close my eyes and walk along the stony country lanes of Corsica again. I can't see the sea yet, but the wind tells me that it will soon appear majestically on the horizon. More sultry words spill out of my amygdala, but I manage to regain control and get back to the point.
The longevity could be better, but couldn't it always be with fragrances from this genre?

So, whoever has made it this far is my hero. Thanks for hanging in there.