What three vintages do to a Chardonnay 

A single harvest gives you one version of a year. Three give you a conversation between them. 

The 2025 forms half the blend and carries the fruit. The 2024 adds 35% and holds the shape. The 2023 makes up the final 15% — the smallest share, and the one you notice, because three years in barrel have turned it savoury and slow. 

Johann Fourie took the idea from outside still wine altogether. Champagne houses keep reserve wines back to build depth. Tawny port blends across decades. A solera layers young wine into old, year after year, until every bottle carries a trace of all of them. TR3S applies that patience to Chardonnay, and it only works because Benguela Cove Chardonnay ages — the 2023 still had something left to give. 

As far as we know, no other South African estate has bottled a still Chardonnay this way. 

In the glass 

Lemon, white peach, grapefruit, melon, nectarine. Then, underneath, roasted hazelnut, brioche, oyster shell, nougat and cashew, with a trace of spice and lanolin. 

The wine spent time in French 300-litre barrels across all three vintages, and the oak has gone entirely — you meet it as texture, not flavour. The palate is concentrated and quiet: fine acidity, a creamy weight, a finish that holds longer than you expect it to. 

It drinks now. It will keep five to eight years, and it will get better. 

Where it grew 

West-facing slopes just above the Walker Bay coast, planted to CY277 and CY96 on weathered shale with a very high calcium content. Cool air moves between the Kogelberg Biosphere and the water, which slows ripening and keeps acid in the fruit. That acidity is why this wine can carry three vintages without any of them tiring.