Grade, origin and age are the three words used to sell oud, and only one of them means anything you can check in a shop.
Oud is the most expensive thing on this counter and the easiest to mislead somebody about, so here is what we actually tell people.
Start with the honest structural fact: almost all oud oil sold anywhere today comes from cultivated trees rather than wild ones, and that is a good thing rather than a scandal. Wild agarwood is scarce and protected, and anybody offering you large quantities of genuinely wild oud at a price you can afford is telling you a story.
Grade is the word used most and it is worth understanding that there is no standard behind it. Grade one in one shop is grade three in another, because each shop grades its own stock. It is a description of relative quality within that shop's range, and it is useful in exactly that way and no other. Ask what it is being compared against.
Origin is genuinely meaningful for smell and genuinely unverifiable at a counter. Oils from different regions do smell recognisably different, and no shop here can prove to you where a given bottle came from. We tell customers where we were told it came from, in those words, and the price is based on how it smells rather than on the name of a country.
Age is the claim to be most careful with. Aged oil does change, it does get smoother, and a great deal of what is sold as twenty years old is not. There is no test for it.
So here is what you can actually check, in a shop, with your own nose. Put a single drop on the back of your hand, not a smear. A good oil will open sharp and perhaps a little barnyard, and it will settle within fifteen minutes into something sweet and woody that stays close to the skin for hours. A poor oil stays flat and thin, or smells strongly of alcohol, or disappears in forty minutes. Thickness is not quality; plenty of thick oils are thick because of what has been added.
And the most useful advice of all: buy three millilitres. Nobody should spend thousands on a first bottle of oud, and any shop that will not sell you a small amount to live with for a month is telling you something about itself.
