Ten years on from planting the wine sensory garden in 2014 at Whicher Ridge, our garden has grown upwards and spread out! The entire sensory garden is now mature and full of plants. It is an eclectic mix of carefully chosen fruit trees, flowers, herbs and seasonal vegetables all year round, ensuring that it is a pleasure to explore, regardless of which season of the year you visit. Our sensory garden is always changing and evolving with regular additions of new aromatic or textural plant discoveries.

The wine sensory garden has become a biodiversity hot spot on our farm, providing food and nesting habitats for a wide selection of native birds, as well as being home for a huge range of insects like European honey bees, native bees, spiders and beneficial insects, as well as small reptiles like frogs and lizards, and small shy native animals like the Mardo and Western Pygmy Possums. It is quite literally humming with colour, life, aromas and flavours.

What is a Wine Sensory Garden?

A sensory garden is designed specifically to stimulate one or more of your five senses which are sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch. These gardens encourage you to view plants at close range, to reach out and touch, to inhale a fragrance, to listen to the sounds in the garden, and to taste fragrant leaves and fruits.

A wine sensory garden is created based on this same principle of stimulating your senses with a variety of plants with different aromas, tastes, textures, colours and shapes. It is an immersive natural space where the plants chosen specifically tell the story of the aromas and flavours which are characteristic of a particular grape variety and which can be smelt or tasted in the wines made from that particular variety.

Wine tasting itself is an incredibly sensory experience. Your experience of a glass of wine involves a complex interplay of all of your senses. It starts with the swirl of the wine in your glass and you are looking at the vibrant colour. It continues with the aromas wafting up from the glass, then the flavours you taste when you take a sip, and it finishes with how the wine feels in your mouth.

Our Pick + Sip wine experience combines these two sensory experiences together as an in-depth wine tasting in our wine sensory garden. The combination creates an immersive wine tasting session which is the perfect way to learn about where wine flavours come from, how the soil and climate also influence those flavours, and how winemaking practices also add another layer of flavours and texture to a wine.

How Do the Plantings in a Wine Sensory Garden Stimulate the Senses?

1. The plants chosen can create visual stimulation in the sensory garden plants with different flower and leaf colours, leaf shapes and textures, bark texture and colours on shrubs and trees as well as the working with the different effects that the shady and full sun spots in the garden provide. Garden sculpture and pots can also add a variety of non-living colourful and fun items to the garden too which we do use in our wine sensory garden.
2. Wind can create a variety of sounds in many plants, like leaves being blown around and grasses rustling. Gravel paths and dried leaves can be walked upon for a satisfying ‘crunch’, and the sounds of birds and insects in the sensory garden can fill the air. In our wine sensory garden we have also added in elements like wind chimes.
3. There are lots of ways to stimulate tastebuds in a sensory garden. You could use numerous plants such as fruit trees, vegetables and herbs, and many of these are also colourful and aromatic. Some great examples from our wine sensory garden are mints, thymes, basil, mulberries, blueberries, lemon tree, lime tree, raspberries, pomegranate, lemon sorrel, lemon grass, two types of small santolina shrubs, peaches, nectarines, pears, Tasmanian pepperleaf, nasturtiums, and lilly pilly.
4. The bark and leaves of many plants have different, interesting textures. Some succulents and plants like ‘lambs ears’ have velvety textured leaves, banksia trunks can be rough and bumpy, there are rough-barked native trees like some eucalyptus tree and paperbarks, and mosses feel silky and feathery. We are planning on creating a dedicated texture section in our wine sensory garden this year which will utilise many of these plants.
5. Aromas are most closely associated with flowers, but there are many culinary herbs, Australian natives and small fragrant leafed Santolina shrubs which have fragrant foliage. Mulch and soil used around the garden can also have a distinctive smell. We have many plants in our wine sensory garden which are fragrant like several different thymes, basils and mints, oregano, olive herb (santolina), bay laurel tree, curry bush (santolina), french lavender, rosemary, lemon and lime balm, geraniums, makrut lime, Tasmanian pepperleaf and Murraya (Orange Jessamine).

Which Grape Varieties Will You learn About in the Wine Sensory Garden at Whicher Ridge?

In Australia, wine is made from approximately 160 different wine grape varieties. At Whicher Ridge, we make wine from 10 different wine varieties, and in our wine sensory garden we have focussed in on 8 of these.

These are Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Viognier, Shiraz, Mourvedre, Malbec and Cabernet Sauvignon.

For example, in the Sauvignon Blanc section of our wine sensory garden, the Descriptor bed is planted out with a pear tree, a lemon tree, a passionfruit vine, an elderflower, lemongrass, white peach, lemon balm, perennial and annual white and yellow flowering plants of varying sizes, lemon thyme and lemon verbena. The adjacent Affinity Bed has lavender, rosemary, a lemon tree, asparagus, Vietnamese coriander, lemon thyme, lemongrass and a caper berry bush. There are seasonally changing plantings of vegetables and herbs like radishes, spinach, parsley, silverbeet, peas, dill, coriander, salsify, yellow and green coloured butter and cos lettuces, lemon thyme and chives.

When Can you Visit our Wine Sensory Garden?

The wine sensory garden is open all year round, on Wednesday to Sunday from 12pm each week when our Cellar Door.

You can book a Wander in the Garden with the winemaker and gardener, Cathy in the morning at 9am all year round. The Pick + Sip Experience operates from September through to June from 10am but it is not available during the wet and windy Winter months of July and August.

Further Useful Links about the Wine Sensory Garden at Whicher Ridge

1. Travelling Corkscrew story on our wine sensory garden in October 2015  just after it opened.
2. Australian Country article on our sensory garden from March 2017.
3. Country Style article on our wine sensory garden in February 2020

Our wine sensory garden from above – Credit to Tim Campbell Photo