Eben Sadie’s Mission

Bruce Schoenfeld in Swartland, South Africa

From our Archives

Every once in a while, I come across a winemaker with such confidence in his convictions, such philosophical purity to his techniques, that he’s capable of singlehandedly altering the mindset of his appellation.

Eben Sadie of South Africa’s Sadie Family Wines doesn’t have the renown of the Rhone’s Michel Chapoutier, or Burgundy’s Dominique Lafon, or California’s Helen Turley. But he’s every bit as certain as they are that he’s making wine as it should be made.

It’s hard to argue with him. In this viticultural pocket about 20 miles north of Paarl, Sadie is crafting the most compelling wine from South Africa I’ve ever tasted. There are only three of them, a Rhone-blend white (Palladius) and two Syrah-based reds (Columella and Sequillo), and all are made in small quantities (though there’s twice as much Sequillo, the product of a joint venture with a South African millionaire, as the others.)

Almost nobody I know, even in South Africa, has ever had them. But word is spreading.

Traveling through the Cape winelands after visiting Sadie and tasting through the line, I was quizzed on Sadie’s ways of working. Is it true he doesn’t irrigate? What about his plans to make wine in buried amphora, like the ancient Greeks? Is his Columella wine really that good?

Sadie also owns a winery, called Dits del Terra, in Spain’s similarly arid Priorat region. I haven’t sampled those wines yet – I hope to this summer – but the way he talks about them makes it evident that they’re a product of the same intense vision.

It’s the only way he knows how to work.

Sadie traveled the world for several years, living in France and Germany, Austria and Italy, Spain and Oregon, immersing himself in the winemaking culture of each country. He helped gain acclaim for the Spice Route brand as a young winemaker, but has moved away from that fruit-forward style. “When you’re 24, you want to show the world how good you are,” he says. “The wines start to taste like your ambition.”

Now 34, his company in Swartland consists of himself, his brother, and his sister. Its entire business is capturing the terroir of these jagged hills of the Western Cape in a bottle. Consistency, that staple of brand-building, doesn’t interest him, and with wines made a few hundred cases at a time, it doesn’t have to. “The problem with the New World is the obsession with perfection,” he says. “There’s no such thing as perfection. It’s all imperfection.”

Almost alone among the area’s viticulturists, Sadie refuses to mitigate the intensity of a South African summer by irrigating. “It alters the climate,” he explains. “I want the vintage to announce itself in my wine. I want it to speak of fortune, misfortune, whatever the case may be.”
By doing so, he makes the suave consistency of most wines seem simplistic by comparison. His 2004 Columella has the core of black fruit typical of Swartland Syrah (Shiraz), but a bracing layer of red fruit plays rhythm guitar to the bass of the cassis and plum. One hundred of the four hundred cases have come to the United States, imported by European Cellars’ Eric Solomon. They’re worth every bit of the $70 price.

A barrel sample of the 2005 shows off an utterly different South Africa wine. Powerful but not overbearing, with a Rhone meatiness to the Syrah (Shiraz), but utterly limpid in a way that I wish more Hermitage could be, it could well evolve into the most interesting wine South Africa has produced.

Such wines aren’t made from marketing plans or focus groups, or even the desire to please your customers. It takes an almost religious certitude in your methods, and the sense that no other way forward is possible. Agree with the winemaker or disagree, you can’t help but taste that certitude in the wine.