Why learn about wine aromas?
For us as winemakers, it's our job to understand wine aromas - we use the aroma of the wine in many decisions in the winery, such as barrel selections, time on oak and blends (see our blog post Winery Secrets Revealed on how winemaking decisions and aromas interact).
But what about someone who just wants to enjoy wines? Why take the time to learn about aromas? Here's three good reasons:
- It's actually a great game to test out your senses - by yourself or with a group of friends - to try and detect a detail like grape variety, the age of the wine, or even wine faults.
- Secondly knowing what wine descriptors you do and don't like can help with selecting a wine based on its label. Maybe you don't like heavy oak influence so characters such as vanilla and coconut might indicate a wine isn't for you, or you really love a Shiraz with black pepper notes.
- Finally, for a lot of people, concentrating on and taking in a wine's aromas can give a sense of presence and invoke memories - leading to a more enjoyable experience when drinking wine.
Now you know the why, read on to learn the how.
Identifying dominant aromas
There are hundreds of chemical aromas that are naturally formed in wines; we are just looking to pick out the dominant ones. To help isolate a particular aroma amongst everything that is hitting your nose, an aroma kit is often used to train your brain. We have compiled a range of aromas and lined up them up with wines.
Below shows how we have grouped the wine aromas.
Your own aroma kit

By now I'm sure you have become a wine aroma kit enthusiast and decided you need one of your own. If you Google 'Wine Aroma Kit', you'll quickly realise that they are stupidly expensive and lose all that enthusiasm. But luckily, we've got your back!
Our 2023 Spring Experience Eden package includes our very own wine aroma kit, which we've put together, providing a range of common wine aromas, along with four of our wines with a guide on using the kit to study the wines.
What’s included:
- A guide to introduce wine aromas
- An official wine aroma wheel
- A kit of wine aromas to help you pick out dominant aromas
- Four bottles of our wines, each with an aroma guide and matching aromas from the kit
- 2022 Hidden Valley Riesling
- 2021 Her Grenache
- 2018 Wayward Girl
- 2019 Gold Leaf Reserve Cabernet
The package is available as part of our Experience Eden subscription from $129, or as a one-off order for $149.



