The factory tours
A free explanation from flower to bottle.
Olivier Cleynen — CC BY 4.0 · Rüdiger Stehn from Kiel, Deutschland — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Rüdiger Stehn from Kiel, Deutschland — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Dennis G. Jarvis — CC BY-SA 2.0
Yes. The three houses — **Fragonard, Galimard and Molinard** — open their premises to visitors with **free** guided tours in several languages, explaining the path from flower to bottle: extraction, distillation, the "concrete" and the "absolute", and the role of the **"nose"**, the expert who distinguishes hundreds of materials by smell. The tour inevitably ends in a **shop**, which is the business model: no ticket, but gentle pressure to buy. Nothing obliges you to, and the tour alone is worth the time. Some houses offer a **make-your-own-perfume workshop**, which is paid and booked in advance.
**May and June** for the **May rose**, picked over only a few weeks, and **August** for the **jasmine** at its peak, with the jasmine festival around the start of August. In those two seasons you see the fields actually working and smell the town before you enter a factory. Outside them the tours and museums run all year but the fields are still. Avoid **midday in July and August**: the town is on a steep slope and climbing it in the heat is punishing. **Half a day to a day** is enough for it.
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A town on a hill some 350 metres above the Riviera, and for centuries the **perfume capital of the world** — a story that began with leather rather than flowers. Grasse was a centre of tanning in the Middle Ages, and in the sixteenth century a fashion arose for **scented gloves** to cover the smell of the tanning, so the tanners began perfuming their goods with the region's flowers. The leather trade then collapsed and the perfume remained — and the whole town turned to it. Its climate is the second reason: sheltered from the wind and mild, it grows **jasmine, the May rose, orange blossom, lavender and tuberose** at a rare quality. The fields around it are still farmed for the great perfume houses, and **picking jasmine before dawn** is still an annual tradition, because the flower loses its scent in the sun. The old town itself is not elegant like the restored Riviera villages: tall narrow lanes with faded frontages, stairways, old washhouses and a twelfth-century cathedral holding paintings by Rubens. It is a **working town**, not a frontage, and that surprises anyone expecting Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Three major perfume houses here open their factories to visitors **free of charge**.
A free explanation from flower to bottle.
Jasmine and May rose picked before dawn for the great houses.
Twelfth century, holding paintings by Rubens.
Old town, 06130 Grasse