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.

Malu Lambert

Multi-award-winning wine writer and critic Malu Lambert writes for a variety of international and local publications. Malu won the title of the Mont Blanc Emerging Wine Writer of the Year at the Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards 2019. She also won the Veritas Young Wine Writer in 2015. Most recently she co-authored Klein Constantia: The Home of Vin de Constance, which was the winner of the ‘Discovering and Presenting Wines’ category of the 2023 OIV. Malu writes for numerous South African titles, and was the wine editor of Food & Home for five years. Internationally, she has also written for Jancis Robinson, Decanter, The Buyer, Falstaff, Club Oenologique, Drinks International, Thirteen Barrels, The Japanese Times, and more. She is also a taster on the Platter's Guide, South Africa’s most definitive and respected guide to wine. Malu is a regular on South Africa's judging panels, including Winemag, Wine-of-the-Month Club and was recently the chairperson for the inaugural Fine Wine Awards by Amex. She also judges for Decanter, IWSC and Concours Mondial du Sauvignon.