Creation Art of Chardonnay 2022

At the top of the winding Hemel-en-Aarde Road, you’ll find Creation Wines, snug in a bowl of mountain fynbos. Creation is the concern of Jean-Claude and Carolyn Martin, who established the estate in 2002. The vines were intentionally planted on virgin soils, to avoid any virus contamination, important for their clean, cool wines. The Martins are fastidious in the vineyard, employing techniques such as massal selection to create their own unique identity. The Creation Art of Chardonnay is an exemplar of this, carefully selected from a small pocket within a single vineyard, a site that glitters with seams of quartz. Hand-harvested, 50% spontaneous fermentation in a mix of old and new French oak. The wine was left on the lees for a further 10 months before barrel-selection, bottled unfiltered and unfined. It glows with ripe citrus, lemon curd, some struck match and a gentle veil of cardamom spice and hazelnut. The palate is masterful in its tension between vivid stony acidity and tapering dryness, the combination of which neatly encases the deep citrus core and drives the long, persistent finish.