Sandalwood Dreams, Part 6: Distillation

The production of sandalwood starts with the harvest of the tree. The whole tree is taken with the only parts left in the field being the leaves and small branches and small roots. On receival in our processing centre the process of extracting the valuable heartwood starts, this is the part of the tree that contains the luxurious sandalwood oil. The harvest is sorted into various products, not all of the heartwood goes toward making sandalwood oil, certain pieces of sandalwood lend themselves toward other traditional uses, for example; wood working into beautiful furniture, artefacts or use in incense or traditional medicinal applications such as Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine. Nothing goes to waste; after sorting and removal of sapwood a home or market is found for all byproducts from this process.

When the heartwood has been extracted it is chipped and ground to a specific particle size designed to optimise the yield and quality of the oil. The next step involves steam distillation of the oil from the chipped and ground sandalwood heartwood. The process involves passing steam over the chipped and ground sandalwood, the sandalwood oil volatises in the steam and on condensing the oil separates from the water and the oil not being soluble floats to the surface and it is collected. The only chemical that comes in contact with our sandalwood oil is pure water.

Steam distillation of sandalwood is energy intensive. In order to minimise our carbon foot print we use a waste-wood fired boiler, we utilise waste-wood from the local timber industry that would otherwise go to waste and be burnt. Reuse of resources also extends to our water and all water that exits the steam distillation process of sandalwood is processed and reused in the production process again minimising our foot print.

Again nothing goes to waste, we take the exhausted sandalwood powder and process it into a product suitable for sale and valued by customers. It's far too valuable to burn in our boiler!

Quality is vital, our customers expect it and rightly so. If you purchase a fine fragrance containing sandalwood oil it will be expensive and you should expect it to perform. Quality is built into our processes and involves checks and verifications along the entire process. All wood delivered is analysed and the chemistry of the oil in the wood checked. From here the whole process is monitored to ensure that the final product is within specification and will perform according to expectations; analysis includes bench methods such as optical rotation, refractive index and specific gravity, and Gas Chromatography which measures the concentration of the various constituents as well as our trained noses. Olfactory qualities are important and no chemical analysis is a substitute for a good nose. TFS has a panel of noses that appraises each batch of sandalwood oil and just like wines differ and have flavours which are typical and flavours which should not be presents so does sandalwood oil have notes that are typical and notes that should be absent.