[NOTE: 9/27/21 – While I don’t think this review is wrong in any way, to my nose Tennendo’s stock of aloeswood has changed the profile a little on this compared to the old days. It’s still a high quality aloeswood incense, but I feel like some of its more sublime qualities, perhaps not mentioned here, are not as present anymore. It’s one of those changes that feels more a result of variation in natural ingredients than anything severe]. It may be even more true for incense than anything else that you get what you pay for, at least if you have an appreciation for aloeswood. The higher the quality of the wood in the incense, the better the opportunity for a more complex and sophisticated incense. Aloeswood, depending on quality and variety, can impart widely divergent qualities to the aroma from resinous, hoary age to tantalizing sweetness, from spice to qualities best described as lacquer/turpentine like in their intensity. Tennendo’s high end, long stick Enkuu-Horizon covers nearly all of these qualities in one very intense and complex incense.
I’d only recommend this to those who don’t mind some of the stronger aspects of aloeswood, particularly the resinous qualities that might bring to mind turpentine or other wood resin-based chemicals. Not that this incense is unrefined by any means, but it will wallop you with its intensity. The closest scent that reminds me of Enkuu is Shoyeido/Horin’s Muro-machi incense, which combined the heavy aloeswood scent with a thicker, almost swelteringly sweet top note. However, where Muro-Machi plays between these two notes, Enkuu is far more complex. For one thing, Enkuu has some of the qualities of greener aloeswood sticks as quieter notes, such a menthol and mint. The wood quality is very high and occasionally it seems that the mix may be leavened with a slight amount of kyara; at the very least it has that sort of smoothness combined with ancient resinous depth.
All these various elements play off each other in an analagous way to Kyuykodo’s Sho-Ran-Ko and make me feel this will always be a surprising and excellent incense, although where Sho-Ran-Ko has a sort of a Mercurian gentleness and humor to it, Enkuu is more like Pan in its ancient, pagan splendor. At first Enkuu is likely to be overwhelming, but with each stick its careful and complex composition reveals itself, making it a taste worth acquiring.