There’s nothing subtle about the scent perfuming the reception at SB Winemaker’s House. Sun-warmed leather. Green citrus. Sandalwood. Uninhibited white flowers. The bouquet evokes the DNA of Mendoza, Argentina’s largest wine region, where lavish gated gardens and photogenic vineyards root in a rugged frontier of high-desert plains.
Ana Lovaglio runs the stylish seven-suite inn with her trailblazing mother, Susanna Balbo, Argentina’s first woman winemaker, and they developed the scent with Buenos Aires perfumer Dolores BA. Technically it’s a room and linen spray, “but you can use it as a perfume as you like,” Lovaglio said, pressing a small bottle into my hand to take home.
That was really when it started. In less than a year’s time, I went from a guy who hadn’t cared about what he smelled like since his Acqua di Gio-dipped teens to a born-again scent evangelist with an apothecary of candles, oils, incense cones and colognes — all collected during trips.
I blame the hotel industry for rekindling this habit after two largely unscented decades. Lately it feels like every hospitality brand I encounter has a toe in the fragrance space, from corporate biggies like JW Marriott, which partnered with cultish Flamingo Estate on a mossy garden candle, to indies like the Store, a savvy hotel reimagining of Oxford’s historic Boswells department store. During a recent stay at Hotel Balzac, a flawless Relais & Châteaux off the Champs-Élysées, a warm blend of cardamom, orange and musk embodied the warm, sensual vibe and physicality of the hotel, a puzzlebox of intimate spaces illuminated by sconces and candles. Unlike the decades of bespoke hotel fragrances crafted with the aim to subconsciously influence, these new scents don’t toil in silence. They announce to travelers loudly: You have arrived.
“This is storytelling through scent,” says Tiffany Rose Goodyear, whose company, Scentex, has developed experiential fragrance activations for clients like the Denver airport and Dubai. “Travel is both transformative and transportive. So is fragrance. You can smell something and it’s almost like time travel.” Goodyear, who holds a master’s degree in marketing, started her company during the pandemic, when people were losing what she calls our most primitive sense. “People realized how important smell is. That’s why I feel like scent is being reintroduced as a public experience.”
And packaged as one you can take home. My home’s current travel-inspired scent is Indian lotus. A stick of incense from Leela Palaces burns as I’m writing this. In the gardens of these magnificent subcontinental hotels, fallen blooms get “flowercycled” into the most hypnotic, opulent incense. Whorls of smoke unspool from the smoldering tip. Backlit by the living-room windows and dissipating into a calligraphic haze, the smoke has a pewter tint and mystic look, like if you could see the spells issued from a wand. It makes me want to book a ticket to Jaipur.
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Matt Stevens, proud hotel snob and cofounder of the Hotel Lobby fragrance brand, understands this effect: “Our candles and the campaigns we create around them tend to spark future travel plans,” while also letting travelers reminisce about the places they’ve already been, he says. He and his wife, Lindsay Silberman, launched Hotel Lobby with candles and, in 2024, expanded into reed diffusers and wearable fragrance. Last year they also collaborated with Auberge’s storied Hotel Jerome on an Aspen candle that communicates the town’s mountains-and-cowboys legacy through cedar, leather and pine. Their other evocative scents include Miami (bergamot, rosewood, cashmere) and New York (amber, sage, saffron), the cities he and Silberman divide their time between with their ivory long-haired Dachshund, Pierre, as well as further-flung hotspots like Paris and Positano. “Our customers not only love to travel, they also love to share their experiences and stories with others and dream about going back to their favorite hotels,” Stevens says.
The one I’m dreaming about going back to is the Hotel du Couvent, nestled in the labyrinthine old town of Nice. Scent was a paid actor when I stayed in December. The aroma of freshly baked bread wafted into the courtyard from the boulangerie, which is open to the public. L’Herboristerie du Couvent, the cozy herbalist shop, smelled like an old library hidden in a eucalyptus forest. At turndown, a blend of rose petals, cinnamon, sweet mint and other aromatics showed up in a soothing loose-leaf tisane, accompanied by a candle in a matching amber glass vessel. I lit it before bed, which filled my chambers with incense, myrrh and echoes of the address’s Catholic heritage.
More than other senses, scent triggers memory. So it makes sense that experience-obsessed Millennials — 87% of which say travel is a financial priority, according to the Circus research firm — are making fragrance a new consumer frontier. When we were younger, surfing a wave of Cool Water to prom, designer colognes (like clothes) communicated style and taste. As we tiptoe with horror into middle age, the Instagram post of a plane ticket peeking out a passport has earned that job. Fragrance, when connected to place, can be a powerful proxy.
Lately I’ve been alternating between smelling like London (Park Hyatt’s spicy amber eau de parfum, blended by Parisian master perfumer Blaise Mautin) and Paris, where I just picked up the citrusy, woods-and-wintergreen Morris from Jardin d’Ecrivens, an atelier of literary-inspired fragrances I retreated to while waiting for a dinner reservation in the rain.
I had to temporarily retire my SB Winemaker’s spritz, since the atomizer came off the bottle. I can’t unscrew the cap, leaving the precious liquid trapped inside. It’s exclusively available at the hotel, so I’ll just have to go back to Mendoza to get more. And wasn’t that the point all along?
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