2019 The Agnes

I have been a huge fan of Peter-Allan Finlayson’s Crystallum since I tasted his wines on my inaugural trip to the Cape, at the same tasting where I first met Chris Alheit when they shared a cellar. Here is one of Hemel-en-Aarde’s most refined and terroir-driven expressions of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, utilizing native yeasts, judicious whole-bunch addition and modest levels of new oak, the Clay Shales seeing partial use of foudres and 500-liter barrels. I was hugely impressed by Finlayson’s 2019s, in particular the aforementioned Clay Shales Chardonnay and the Cuvée Cinema Pinot Noir. However, the wine that had me scrabbling around for superlatives was the intermittently released 2018 Whole Bunch cuvée that uses 100% stems. Finlayson pulls this off magnificently; it’s almost Dujac-like in style, the stems lifting the wine rather than defining it – always a tricky balancing act. For fifty bucks stateside, it’s what you call a no-brainer.