Acer pseudoplatanus, to give the tree its proper botanical name, is also responsible for many of those deeply irritating ‘leaves on the line’ excuses that railway companies give out each autumn to explain why their trains are running late. Worst of all, from a perfume perspective, they don’t even really smell of much, though their leaves do have the faintest leathery scent and their wood, once dried enough, burns with a pretty generic woodsmoke smell.

So is Sycomore just an example of misguided marketing, like Ralph Lauren’s dreadfully named Glamourous? Actually, no. Coming from arguably the world’s most tightly policed brand, its name will have been very carefully considered – and actually it almost certainly refers not, as I’d initially thought, to Acer pseudoplatanus at all but to a rather more exotic tree, the so-called Sycomore fig. Ficus sycomorus (to use its Latin name) is a large, spreading tree that grows all over the Middle East, where its heavy shade is much appreciated; it was known to the Egyptians as the Tree of Life. It’s a tree I haven’t sniffed, but my guess is that it shares at least some of the dry, green, slightly fruity scent that we know from other varieties of fig – though ironically there’s only the faintest hint of figginess in Sycomore.

Anyhow, enough about the name. What makes Sycomore extraordinary, for me, is a trick it seems to be able to do that no other perfume I’ve come across seems to be able to do. This is to smell like two completely different scents, depending on whether you smell it close up or at a distance. Up close it has the strong, earthy, pleasantly bitter scent of vetiver, the root of an Indian grass that’s related to lemongrass and citronella. It’s also grown commercially in the Caribbean, and apparently Chanel’s super-high-quality vetiver originated in Haiti.

Vetiver is usually classed as one of the great masculine fragrances, presumably because of its bracing bitterness and lack of cloying sweetness; it’s certainly not a flowery smell. But it also has a warmth and – get this – a touch of smokiness that gives it extra depth and complexity, especially when it’s surrounded by such a delicious cushion of other scents, which mix smokiness with a slightly sweeter touch of fruit. Vetiver is also famous for its staying power, and a spritz of Sycomore can last you all day.

It’s the added fruitiness that, on occasion, one gets a whiff of when someone wearing Sycomore strolls by, and then it’s like a different, warmer, sweeter fragrance altogether, with hardly a hint of the vetiver that dominates the perfume on the skin. If it’s an intentional trick I’m in awe, though it seems perfectly possible, given that Sycomore was created by Chanel’s chief nose Jacques Polge in collaboration with Christopher Sheldrake, the legendary British perfumer who has been Chanel’s director of research and development since 2005.

Like the other fragrances that belong to Les Exclusifs de Chanel, Sycomore costs about twice as much as your average perfume, but it does come in a typically (for Chanel) handsome bottle, beautifully presented in a chunky white-and-black box. The hidden magnet in the heavy black cap, ensuring that the iconic twin Cs of the  Chanel logo always end up perfectly aligned, is a particularly nice touch, even if it has since been adopted by one or two other brands.

Though it’s a classically masculine scent Sycomore is (quite rightly) marketed as a unisex fragrance, and like most men’s perfumes it can smell wonderful on a woman. Yet what I love most is that, from the very first sniff, it has a wonderful feeling of luxury, quality and depth, which are things that are all too often lacking in other perfumes. And who could resist its baffling cleverness, like a cryptic crossword in scent?

Eau Sauvage is a scent I love, not just for its superb intrinsic quality but also for its history as the first modern men’s fragrance to have a strongly floral character, cleverly disguised by the herbal and citrus elements of a classic cologne. It was also one of the first perfumes I ever wore, so there’s an element of nostalgia to my affection too.

So when the last bottle ran out it seemed only natural to buy another – except that when I next sprayed some on it was blatantly obvious that there was something missing: namely a huge hole where the lemony part of the formula should have been. Yes, Dior (or rather Firmenich or whichever fragrance company makes the scent for them) has taken the original and reformulated it, in one of those secretive, below-the-belt moves that give the industry such a bad name.

These kinds of underhand tricks go on all the time, but it’s particularly annoying when it happens to an iconic fragrance – and particularly stupid when what’s been taken out is the citrus element that makes Eau Sauvage such a distinctive perfume in the first place; without it it’s a muted, muffled thing, with about as much appeal as a piece of damp felt.

I’ve learned my lesson, but Dior obviously haven’t learned theirs.

Or perhaps I’m just not being imaginative enough? That’s perfectly possible, but it also raises an interesting point, which is what an iron grip the perfume licensees have over the way their products are pictured and advertised.

Like wine or music, perfume doesn’t, in itself, have much (if any) innate visual appeal, and perfume bottles, though far more varied in design than bottles of wine, are often so hideous to contemplate that it’s kinder not to illustrate them at all. Take the unutterably hideous Womanity from Thierry Mugler, for example… (NB I mean ‘take’ in a physical rather than a metaphorical sense – as in please, please take it a very long way away and never bring it back.)

My problem? It’s that in all those hundreds of perfumes there are maybe three or four I’d want to buy another time, and they’re nearly always the ones I know and like already. Of all the hundreds of new launches every year, in other words, barely one or two are worth a second sniff, and most of them are (not to mince words) utterly vile.

There are occasional exceptions, but they’re pretty rare, and often unexpected: Paco Rabanne Black XS for Men, for example, which is ridiculously sweet but enjoyably silly and smells of strawberries (though it’s based on a variation on orange); or Marc Jacobs Bang – hideous advertising, hideous bottle, but actually not such a bad scent inside. But mostly it’s sniff and recoil in horror: why does anyone buy this stuff? Just because they’re told to? It doesn’t seem to make sense.

There again, maybe it was always this way: apart from sad exceptions it’s the good, on the whole, that tends to survive, while the rubbish and the dreadful is quietly dropped and disappears. And perhaps it was just the same in the 1920s or the 1950s. The difference, today, is that there are far too many launches, the industry having backed itself into an unprofitable corner where only the latest thing sells, but only because it’s the latest thing – and it’s all too quickly superceded.

But in the meantime the (very) occasional thing comes along, and one of these, thanks to Nathalie Grainger and the inimitable Roja Dove, was being invited to write a chapter for Quintessentially Perfume, a new book on perfume and the perfume industry. Next up: how about a weekly perfume column? I’m waiting for your call…

What a highly collectible perfume by a fairly obscure, high-end brand was doing in the Weymouth branch of T.K.Maxx I have no idea, but there it was, ours for the princely sum of £16.99 (recommended retail price €135).

Created by the much-admired perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena (now the in-house perfumer for Hermès) for the company he founded in 2000, Osmanthus gets an admiring review in the even more widely admired Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, and you can see why.

It’s a gentle, sweet but subtle scent, whose plush peachy centre is reminiscent of Guerlain’s timeless Mitsouko, though it seems to lack either Mitsouko’s strength of character or its mysterious staying-power. Yet Osmanthus has magic of its own, and its apparent evanescence on the skin proves something of a disappearing trick – for after putting a little on the back of my hand and noting that it didn’t seem to last very long, what should happen but that an hour or two later, as if from nowhere, its fresh, fruity scent would suddenly snap into focus again, almost as strong as when I first sprayed it on.

I’ve no idea how it’s done, or even whether the effect was intentional, but my guess is that it’s got something to do with the way Osmanthus’ peachiness bonds with the perfume’s other elements, some of which are a little surprising, like castoreum, a resinous compound extracted from beavers that has a leathery, animalic smell and is also found in Chanel’s wonderful Cuir de Russie.

Natural osmanthus, incidentally, is an attractive evergreen shrub which, in sheltered conditions, will grow to the size of a small tree. It grows wild in the Himalayas, China and Japan and was first introduced to European gardens in 1771, where it became known as Sweet Tea or Fragrant Olive. In the autumn it bears thousands of small but intensely fragrant white flowers, whose intoxicatingly sweet scent gives the plant its botanical name, Osmanthus fragrans.

Its fragrance, indeed, is remarkably powerful, as we discovered on an autumn visit to the enchanted garden of Brécy, near Bayeux (above). From the massively stepped levels of the formal gardens, which form a kind of vast single staircase up towards the Normandy sky, we recognised osmanthus’ heady scent a long time before we finally located its source, from a couple of dark columnar trees planted close against the south wall of the church, outside the gardens themselves.

Despite the sheer intensity of its fragrance, this is one of the only powerfully sweet scents I know that one can never smell enough (unlike, say, Madonna lilies, whose scent becomes overwhelming after a while): there’s a fresh lemony edge to osmanthus that makes it refreshing and intoxicating all at once. Enjoy Jean-Claude Ellena’s perfume by all means, but plant the tree wherever you can.

In the city I could happily wear one perfume in the morning and another one at night, but down here in deepest Dorset on my almost-island I can go all week without spraying on a single scent.

It’s not that I love perfume any less, but rather that, when you come to think of it, perfume is at its heart a social pleasure, best shared with other people, like food and wine. Smelling perfume on one’s own is a bit like eating a gourmet meal or drinking a bottle of vintage wine alone – still a pleasure, certainly, but one diminished by the lack of anyone to share it with.

Even worse, in perfume’s case, its pleasure is diminished yet further by the fact that, after a short while, your nose becomes so accustomed to the scent you’re wearing that it’s often hard to smell it on yourself at all, though other people, hours later, will often catch a drift of it and ask you what it is.

Solitary pleasures have their place, of course, and sometimes when I go to bed at night I spray a favourite perfume on to savour as I drift to sleep, but all the same it’s slightly sad to think that such a pleasurable pursuit has, like fashion, no real place outside the crowded social setting of a city or a town.

But even among the most brilliantly put-together perfumes each person’s individual reaction counts for a lot. Smell taps in to such deeply rooted – and often subconscious – memories and associations for each of us that two people can have completely different gut-reactions to the same scent.

And not only that: it actually smells completely different to each of them, even though their brain is presumably processing the same elements in a fairly similar way. Most scientists seem to agree that, unless we suffer from particularly severe sight problems, the way I see Hèrmes orange is almost certainly the same as the way you see it.

Smell, though, appears to work in a rather different manner. We may well smell the same scents in the same objective way, but the personal associations that specific scents have for us seem to be more powerful than what we actually smell – conceivably for the simple reason that we have such trouble describing them in words.

Here’s a perfect example. Sables was first launched by the late, great French perfumer Annick Goutal in 1985 and was recently relaunched in the UK after one of those mysterious absences that gives the perfume industry its faint whiff of Stalinism.

Sables is one of my all-time favourite fragrances. Though its name is meant to evoke the high-summer sexiness of sun-baked sand, this fantastically rich, sweetly luxurious scent smells, to me, of all the best things about Christmas – vintage oloroso sherry, mince pies, the delicious heat of an applewood log fire, flaming brandy, Christmas pudding… All very positive associations, as far as I’m concerned.

I’d be the first to admit that Sables is strong stuff, best suited to opulent winter evenings; apply it too liberally and, like Guerlain’s L’heure bleue or Chanel’s No22, it can easily become overpowering. But while I can imagine choking on No22 in too high a concentration, to be overcome by Sables would, for me at least, be like drowning in a butt of Malmsey – frankly not a bad way to go.

To a friend who knows at least as much about perfume as I do, though, Sables has an unattractively medicinal smell with none of the enchanting connotations that give it such a deep and lasting appeal for me. I can (kind of) see what he’s getting at, and if I try hard I can just about identify a hint of cough-mixture about it, but for some reason that association, in my mind, is completely drowned out by all the good stuff I’ve already mentioned.

The moral? I’m not sure there is one, but I guess it’s always good to remember there’s no guarantee that everyone is going to share your passion for a particular perfume, no matter how wonderful it smells to you.

Why this should be is a bit of a mystery, but it means that for most people the subject of perfume continues to be surrounded by as much mystification and snobbery as the subject of, say, wine was a good twenty years ago.

Today, largely thanks to two decades of excellent wine journalism, we know more about wine than we ever did before, and that’s reflected not just in our confidence in choosing from the vast array of choice on offer, but also in the booming health of the industry itself.

So why, when wine journalism is so good, is the general standard of perfume writing so pathetic? A lot of the blame lies with the perfume companies themselves, most of whose press releases somehow manage to combine utter nonsense with flights of pretension so other-worldly that one wonders what kind of prescription drugs their copywriters are on. What’s depressing, though, is how many ‘beauty’ journalists simply copy out the crap that the perfume companies send them, which does nothing to help the poor reader understand what the fragrance in question is about.

The result is a sector dominated by the brands with the deepest pockets and the perfumes with the biggest advertising budgets: it’s as if we’re still stuck in the 1970s days of wine, with most people’s choice limited to the scent equivalents of Mateus Rose and Blue Nun.

Is it any wonder shopping for perfume is such a dispiriting experience? With practically no useful information to go on, how is anyone supposed to make an informed decision when they’re confronted by the hundreds of different perfumes on the shelves of an average department store – especially with over-made-up saleswomen bearing down on them from all sides, spraying noxious clouds of the latest big-name scent in their direction?