The drawer started because of one embarrassment in about 1996, and it is now the most valuable thing in the shop.
The card drawer began with a customer who came back for the same oil and a blender who could not remember what he had put in it. That was around 1996, and my grandfather did not enjoy the conversation.
From that week every blend was weighed rather than poured by eye, and every blend got a number and a card. The card carries the base, each material, the weight of each in grammes, the strength, the date and the customer's name. There are eleven thousand four hundred of them.
What that drawer actually buys is three things.
The first is repeatability, which is the obvious one. You come back in a year or in fifteen and get the same oil. A woman wore a blend from 1999 at her daughter's wedding last year and it was on the shelf as a card the whole time.
The second is honesty in the small disagreements. A customer says the last bottle was stronger. Rather than arguing about a memory, we pull both cards. Sometimes they are right and something was mismeasured, and we say so and remake it. Sometimes they are identical, in which case the difference is the weather, their skin or their nose, and we can talk about that instead.
The third is discipline about what we stock. A blend can only be repeated if every material in it can be bought again, so the drawer quietly decides what goes on the shelf. Every year or two a trader passes through with something genuinely wonderful in a single bottle. We buy it for ourselves. It does not go behind this counter, because a card that cannot be filled in 2032 is a promise we should not have made.
The cards are paper, they are filed by number with an index by name, and they live in this shop. They are not on the internet and they will not be. If you have lost your number, your name and roughly the year is usually enough, and finding it takes a few minutes.
