Crystallum The Agnes Chardonnay 2025
£24.45
The wine
A precise Chardonnay, with apple, salted caramel, oatmeal and lime. Textured, with quince behind.
The Agnes is named for the family matriarch. Indigenous-yeast fermentation is slower and less predictable than using cultured yeast, but it is what gives these wines their texture and their variation from year to year. Crystallum is Peter-Allan Finlayson label in the Hemel-en-Aarde, with everything now fermented on indigenous yeasts.
The producer
Crystallum
View all Crystallum winesCrystallum is one of South Africa's most acclaimed producers of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, a small family winery led by the gifted Peter-Allan Finlayson. Based in the cool Hemel-en-Aarde valley near the Atlantic, it has become a benchmark for elegant, Burgundian-inspired Cape wine. Its reputation has grown swiftly.
The focus is on cool-climate sites across the southern Cape, from the clay and shale of Hemel-en-Aarde to the limestone of the Overberg. These maritime vineyards, fanned by ocean breezes, give fruit of freshness and tension. Careful, low-intervention farming underpins the wines.
In the cellar, whole-bunch ferments, wild yeasts and restrained oak shape wines of purity and finesse. The Chardonnays are taut and mineral, the Pinot Noirs fragrant and silky, always favouring elegance over weight. Terroir speaks clearly.
From the widely loved Peter Max Pinot to the single-vineyard Clay Shales, Crystallum offers South Africa at its most refined. Cool, mineral and beautifully balanced, these are Cape wines of genuine world class.
