PEARL, OudObserver
As I have said before I am not going to make this individual focused, or focused on a particular business or vendor as that is not going to be beneficial for anyone, however I will point out the misinformation and it is up to the consumer to determine which vendor has spread that information.
In an art that has been around for a few hundred years, anyone who came on the scene in the last 10-15 years and has just began their journey; they would be considered novices. This is not only the case in the art of distillation but in any art that has hundreds of years of history behind it. There is so much to learn, centuries of knowledge that requires digestion, understanding, consolidation then growth and evolution from that. I remember reading Kayarzen mentioning that for the art of Kodo a person requires more than 30 years of training to full understand and appreciate it. As a distiller it isnt just about through wood in a pot and making oil, but understanding the wood, being able to conceptualize what scent that wood will create and then delivering. Not to even mention the myriad steps before one gets to a final product.
With regards to your question on telling the difference between cultivated oil and wild oil, the technical way you can tell is by the number of the different natural constituents within an oil. Over time the nose can develop to pick up the intensity of those constituents within an oil and use that as an indicator between cultivated wood and wild wood. However this approach on it's own is not bullet proof because if a high quality cultivated wood is used on the one hand and low quality wild wood on the other, you may still find that the cultivated oil will show higher counts of the compounds such as the Alpha agarofuran, agarospirol, Beta Agarofuran etc which are some of the elements that give oudh oil some of its specific dimensions. There are over 40 different elements that contribute to the oudh experience.
Your request that I do the naming and shaming of vendors is not something I will entertain as that is not why I share knowledge. I am happy to deal with your technical questions so with regards to the last two questions you asked below is my answer and which vendors have done that is for you to join the dots.
'logs' with a hollow core like the attached pic "Hollow Log" are not wild oudh, these are cultivated oudhs.
Perfect cylinders like pic attached sample 2 are cultivated oudhs, not wild.
flaky saw dust cores which are white in colour surrounded by a darker wall of fairly cylindrical consistency are cultivated oudhs. Please see this link for a pic
https://www.livinglibations.com/media...agarwood_3.jpg
When cultivated oudhs are being infected the grower drills the tree to a fixed depth from all sides and they avoid crossing through. They would also drill at angle downwards to ensure that they fungus liquid follows gravity into the tree. For example if the radius of the tree is 10cm, the grower will drill only 5cm - 8 cm from the outside towards the core. Then the fungus are introduced and for these logs it is usually a liquid form in a dripper, such as the CA Kit. What the excess liquid does together with the rain water making its way through the feeder tubes is destroys the core and leaves the surrounding. The defense mechanism of the tree builds the walls to defend the rest of the tree and the core crumbles. Hence either they become hollow or very flaky and crumbly.
