The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
No. 2 Notes of Riesling is part of Kelly & Jones' Notes of Wine collection, a series built around translating the aromatic fingerprint of specific grape varietals into wearable scent. Kelly Jones is listed as the perfumer behind the line, and Riesling was always going to be one of the more expressive entries in the lineup, a white wine that trades in stone fruit, delicate florals, and a clean mineral snap rather than oak or tannin. The composition reads like a glass of it: Anjou pear, white peach, raspberry leaf, and bergamot. Nothing dense. Nothing trying to impress. Just the bright, slightly off-dry character of a good Riesling, rendered in Eau de Parfum form. The notes work together like a conversation between fruit and citrus, each one legible but none of them shouting.
What's interesting here is the restraint. Most fruity fragrances chase sugar, candy sweetness, or a syrupy peach that clings. Notes of Riesling goes the other way. The raspberry leaf and bergamot introduce a slightly bitter, leafy edge that keeps the pear and white peach from tipping into dessert territory. The white peach especially, less honeyed than yellow peach, more translucent, less sweet, does a lot of the work here. It's the note that earns the Riesling comparison. The whole composition smells like something you'd pour at the start of an evening, not the end of one.
The evolution
The first 15 minutes belong to the bergamot. It opens sharp and a little soapy, the way a chilled wine smells before you actually taste it, cool and bright against the skin. The citrus has that lifted, almost effervescent quality, the kind of brightness that makes you instinctively check whether there's actually champagne in the glass. Then the Anjou pear arrives, that specific crisp, almost gritty sweetness of biting into the real fruit, not candy. It's a texture as much as a scent, slightly waxy at the edges, with the faint green note of a stem still attached. Around the 30-minute mark the white peach takes over, fuller and rounder, softening the opening's brightness without turning it heavy. There's a velvety quality to the way peach sits on skin, almost creamy, and it tempers the sharper citrus notes into something warmer and more diffuse.
Cultural impact
Notes of Riesling is, in many ways, a quiet achiever. It's a fragrance for someone who wants to smell clean and interesting without performing, the kind of scent that earns compliments through understatement rather than projection. The people who reach for it tend to know exactly what Riesling smells like: stone fruit, a little mineral edge, zero oak. There's an ease to the way it wears, never heavy, never cloying, never asking to be the center of a room. It works best in warm weather, casual settings, and anywhere the goal is to smell like yourself, just slightly improved.
