I’m in a laboratory in a dazzling modernist building deep in a pine forest in Grasse, in the hills of the French Riviera, with the world’s foremost olfactory sorcerer conjuring imaginary objects before my nose. First he dips a spill into fructone – an apple! Then he adds ethyl maltol and the apple morphs into a strawberry. Some small sleight of hand involving fructone, the aldehyde C14 and cassis and we have a velvet peach. My stomach groans. Such nasal trickery may thrill the senses, but it is befuddling to the baser instincts.

Jean-Claude Ellena is an illusionist, a characteristic that has served to make him one of the world’s greatest perfumers and, since 2004, in-house composer for Hermès. Where other noses work with a palette of 1,000 or so materials, Ellena uses just 200; where the average modern fragrance contains more than 100 ingredients, his have 20. Alchemical genius that he is, Ellena deploys such small beginnings in ways that have changed the face of his discipline, most recently with the sublimely flinty Terre D’Hermès, an international hit that has won countless plaudits. Heston Blumenthal’s molecular dalliances are nothing compared to Ellena’s, who conjures whole empires with the flick of a spill.

His latest adventure, Brin de Réglisse, reclaims lavender from the realm of toiletries. For this, no bog-standard lavender would suffice. He whisks me to the nearby LMR laboratories, the perfume world’s supplier of raw materials, to demonstrate. Under his aegis, the 300 molecules in the factory’s highest-grade essence were divided into blocks of 50 and extraneous notes – its “lavatory cleaner aspect” and a sweaty element – removed.

Ellena is invariably referred to as a minimalist; his rebuilt lavender reveals this for the fallacy it is. The aroma is pure, direct, hyperbolic – maximalist, in fact (and ten times the cost). I put it to J-C that he is playing God in this context. “He had only seven days. He was not a specialist,” he guffaws. “This is what is important for me: the illusion, the impression of a thing being greater than the thing itself. I am the creator. Not God. Poor God!” He collapses into belly laughs.

At 60, Ellena is dashing, tactile, exuding charisma like a cologne. He is also at the height of his powers, arguing that it takes 20 years to become a perfumer, another 20 to master the art. He is both son of and father to a perfumer: the Ellena tribe inhales its food before eating in the way other families say grace. Born in Grasse, the fragrance industry’s heartland, this most cerebral of men left school at 17 due to lacklustre performance. His father found him a menial job in a local factory; before long he was its nose.

The Hermèssence fragrances, of which Brin de Réglisse is the latest, are the most exclusive scents Ellena creates. Hermèssences are as esoteric as they are luxurious; bottled critiques of a banal, over-saturated market, retailing at £95 and sold only in Hermès boutiques. Says Ellena: “I call them my poems, my haikus. Every one is a story about lavender, vetiver, paprika – very simple, neither feminine nor masculine, although I don’t like ‘unisex’; that means ‘no sex’!”

Secondly, there are the annual Jardins fragrances, slices of olfactory Impressionism inspired by a location: Tunisian fig leaves steeped in champagne (Un Jardin en Méditerranée, £56); a succulent Egyptian mango (Un Jardin sur le Nil, £56). Finally, there are what Hermès refers to as its “window perfumes” – crowd-pleasers such as Terre d’Hermès (£48), or the recent Kelly Calèche (£63) – although it is ludicrous to speak of such audacious compositions as being in any sense mass-market.

Ellena is entirely unconstrained by the industry’s great, stifling demons: the focus group and marketing brief. “One only needs two per cent of the market to be a success. You don’t need tests for that. In politics you need 51 per cent. But perfume is not a democracy. The democracy is in the choice.” It is a methodology in contrast to the industry en masse, where lowest-common-denominator eaux are churned out with the aim of pleasing all of the people all of the time, thereby pleasing no one.

His signature is immediately recognisable: simplicity; decorum; the aforementioned maximalism masquerading as minimalism; absolute modernity. “To be in my time is the most important thing. In all my compositions I try to avoid melancholy, nostalgia and the past. My approach is the present – no future, no past, today.” Being of one’s time is also how one creates something immortal. It is surely a blessing, as a more reverential talent would be crushed by the enormity of the legacy he inherits at Hermès.

The one person who never sports Ellena’s creations is the man himself: he wears scent only to ascertain how it sits on the skin, preferring to be “neutral” in the way designers adopt uniforms. “My pleasure is to smell my perfume on other people.” Given the devotion with which they are embraced, life must be a continual joy.