French Avenue Spectre Wraith 2.7 oz Eau de Parfum

Rum poured over coffee, with something sweet and raw underneath. Spectre Wraith opens boozy and spiced - aged rum with a spice blend behind it, warm rather than sharp - and within minutes the coffee arrives, dark and bitter and not at all sugary. Vetiver, patchouli and sandalwood run through the heart and keep the whole thing dry and earthy where a lesser gourmand would have gone straight to dessert. Then sugarcane closes it, and that is the clever part: it is a raw, green sweetness, closer to a cane field than to syrup, and it stops the coffee from turning ashy. French Avenue classifies it as an amber-vanilla woody, and the intensity is listed as strong. It is.

Top: Rum, spice blends · Heart: Coffee, vetiver, patchouli, sandalwood · Base: Sugarcane

Eight hours and up, with a trail through the first three that arrives before you do. This is a fragrance that Miami actively works against between May and October. Boozy gourmands are the most heat-reactive category there is - rum and sugarcane both expand aggressively in wet air, and coffee turns from roasted to burnt when it gets too warm. A dose that felt right at seven in the morning is considerably more fragrance than a lunch table wants by one in the afternoon. Handle it accordingly: one spray outdoors in summer, and treat it as a night fragrance. Once the temperature drops in December the same bottle becomes superb, the coffee and vetiver staying defined instead of blurring together.

Cool evenings, dinners, bars, holidays. Not an office fragrance in this climate at any spray count, and not a beach one. Unisex, though it wears a little masculine on most people.

Spectre Wraith is stocked here as the full 2.7 oz bottle only, with no decant size, so smelling it first is the sensible move. Come to the Miami Gardens shop and give it half an hour on skin - the sugarcane takes that long to show up.