An Evening of Scent: Inside Our Fragrance Masterclass

A few times a year, we close the doors to everyone but the people on the list. Amelie & Frank's fills its event space on the Coverdale vineyard with fragrance, wine and firelight, and Lucy Borland, our perfume sommelier and a dear friend of the house, leads the room through scent the way you might lead someone through a cellar. Five years running. Still one of the truest things we do.

We never wanted fragrance to sit on a shelf, waiting to be chosen by accident. We wanted it held, tried, talked about, understood. These evenings are that belief made real, a room full of people, a glass in hand, learning to read a scent the way you would learn to read a vintage.

The room

We built this room for exactly this. A few minutes from the boutique, on the Coverdale vineyard, part of the wider Polperro world. Vines on one side. The hills doing what they do at dusk. On the walls, the work of Ruth Haidar, our artist in residence, whose paintings hold their own kind of scent, colour that lingers the way a top note does. It is a room built to slow people down. That was always the point.

The guide

Lucy Borland stands at the centre of it. A perfume sommelier and fragrance educator, and a dear friend of the house long before she was ever a guest speaker. She takes people through the independent houses we trust most, among them Santa Maria Novella, Trudon, Frapin, Matière Première, Ormaie Paris, Eight & Bob and Lubin, and shows how a fragrance is built. Top note, heart, base. What unfolds in the first five minutes, and what is still there at midnight. By the end of the evening, most people have found the scent that was always theirs. No one has been sold anything. That was never the offer.

The table

Then there is the table. Catering and wine come from Polperro, our own vineyard, so the cuvées are poured beside the fragrances and tasted alongside them. Scent and wine speak the same language, top notes, length, finish, and side by side, each one sharpens the other. It is the whole Peninsula, grown and made and poured a few paces from where you are sitting.

Five years of these evenings

We keep the numbers small on purpose. These were never ticketed events. They are gatherings, held for the people who come back season after season, extended by invitation rather than advertised. Five years in, they have become a quiet tradition of the house, still the clearest way we know to say what we mean by fragrance as an experience, not a purchase.

How to join us

These evenings are held by invitation through the year. Come and see us at Red Hill, or join our list, and we will make sure you hear about the next one. Numbers stay small. They are held close. That is rather the point.

Some things are better kept for a room of forty than broadcast to a feed of forty thousand. This is one of them.