Flores Mediterráneas Bergamota de Calabria Gift Set

Alvarez Gómez Flores Mediterráneas Bergamota de Calabria Gift Set holds a fragrance built on exactly one material, and it would be wrong to dress that up as anything else.

The box holds the Eau de Toilette at 150ml alongside a 30ml spray. The material is Calabrian bergamot, which is the grade of bergamot perfumery has leaned on for centuries. On its own it turns out to have more to it than a plain citrus: an immediate sharpness and clean acidity, then a rounder, faintly floral warmth as it opens, and finally a trace of bitterness off the peel that keeps the whole thing from turning sweet. There is nothing underneath it and nothing arriving later, so the whole pleasure of the thing is in those first twenty minutes and in reapplying when they are over.

That makes it an unusual present, and a good one for the right person. It suits someone who likes simple, clean smells and dislikes being surrounded by a fragrance, or someone who already wears something complicated and wants a bright, uncomplicated alternative for hot mornings.

Presented as a gift set, it arrives ready to hand over. It reads entirely unisex, which removes the usual difficulty of buying scent for somebody whose taste you are unsure of. The honest caveat is longevity: a fragrance with one material in it does not last, so treat it as something to refresh through the day rather than apply once. Given to the right person with that understood, it is a considerate present rather than a token one, and bergamot of this grade is a genuinely lovely thing to smell.

Alvarez Gómez is a family owned perfumery in Spain, built on a Madrid shop on Calle Sevilla that opened in 1899, three young men having come down from Leon to work in scent. Everything larger about the firm, its factory and its presence throughout the country, was built in the 1990s, and a fourth generation leads it.