Extra Virgo makes perfume in a castle. That is not a tagline. Every bottle the house sells is hand blended at the Castle of Montecucchi outside Florence, aged at least three months before it is cut with alcohol, cured another month after that, and poured into Italian crystal sealed with a cap of black Carrara marble. The house publishes all of it. Almost nobody publishes their maceration schedule.

The man behind it is Alex Postiglione, who is also H.H. Prince Ne Min Gy of Limbin, a descendant of the Konbaung dynasty that ruled Burma until the British ended it. He was born in Florence. He studied art history there. On his own website he describes his profession in three words: photographer, founder of Extra Virgo. There is no perfumery school anywhere on his record, and the house has never claimed one for him.

What he has instead is land. The house talks about a set of family properties it calls secret gardens, where Postiglione grows and sources material, with Montecucchi first among them. That is not a metaphor either. The cannabis and the black rosemary in Monte Kush are grown on that estate and extracted there.

“I believe scent transcends time and space, is a symbol of peace and a connection with higher knowledge.”

He does not compose alone, and the credit picture is genuinely tangled, so here is the honest version. Michele Marin is a Florentine perfumer who trained in artistic perfumery at Cinquième Sens in Paris after a first career in cinema and theatre, where he worked with Franco Zeffirelli and Marco Bellocchio. He founded the Bar à Parfums Olfatorio in Florence and runs his own line. He is credited with most of what Extra Virgo has released. Sileno Cheloni, another Florentine and the nose behind Aquaflor, is credited with two of the Forbidden Botanica. Postiglione carries the creative director credit on the industry paperwork, and the brand's own site says the first collection was formulated by him.

Those two statements do not perfectly agree, and we are not going to pretend they do. What is clear enough is the shape of the thing: a very small Florentine circle, working for itself first, with two trained noses in the room. Pitti Immagine named both Marin and Cheloni as collaborators when the house debuted at Pitti Fragranze in 2022, which is as close to a house statement as this question gets.

One more thing before the bottles, because it explains why these smell the way they do. The house puts its formulas at 70 to 80 percent natural content and dilutes to roughly 25 to 30 percent in natural alcohol. That is extrait territory by any measure, and it is why a two millilitre sample of any of these goes further than you expect. It is also why they are expensive. You are buying a lot of absolute.