Tim James: Young vines, new Sadie wines

There’s poignancy in seeing the death of a vineyard while still being able to taste the lovely energy of the wine it once offered. Last week I wrote about just that, in Alheit’s Radio Lazarus. Today, quite the opposite: a story of the first wines from vineyards scarcely out of childhood – perhaps they lack the soil-wisdom of those gnarled old trunks and roots, but the youthful limbs have splendour in their vigour, and they carry the future. If seeing the onset of final decrepitude in a vineyard like Lazarus is a melancholy privilege, how much greater the pleasure, over some years, of observing the emergence of a great new one.

On the Sadie farm on the Paardeberg, Rotsvas, there are three young vineyards planted to an mix of varieties – partly experimental in gauging the suitability of a range of Mediterranean grapes for an ever-dryer Swartland. The most mature of them, named Rooidraai, now contributes something to the Signature red blend, Columella. The two others, one of black grapes one of white, from the 2024 vintage are supplying field-blend wines for the District Series. (Personally, I would have been pleased if they’d gone into their own Field Blend Series, rather than triggering a meaningless, bland renaming of the loved and respected Old Vineyard Series/Ouwingerdreeks simply in order to include these contrastingly young newcomers.)

In 2016, when I wrote a lengthy profile of Eben in the British journal World of Fine Wine, he’d finally taken possession of the small farm, which had been a part of Lammershoek. I wrote about the nascent Rooidraai vineyard:

“I’d seen this piece of land change over the years, from when it was planted with Cabernet Sauvignon (ripping out these vines, which Eben considered an affront to the Swartland terroir, was almost his first action on taking over his small farm), through removal of rocks and stone, through plantings of different crops to help prepare the soil, to now, when drainage had been installed and the ground was dotted with short canes indicating, according to some abstruse system that even Eben didn’t understand, where the young vines were soon to be planted by the nursery.”

I quoted him as saying then that “To have a future, you must plant. You realize, there’s nothing else. This is it.” He meant it, I realised, literally, symbolically, even spiritually. The other vineyards followed, laboriously emerging on granitic slopes that had been covered with scrub, rocks and a small forest of bluegums. And now, with crops coming off them for a few years, deemed suitable for wines with Sadie Family Wines labels, a significant stage in that future has been reached. For both vineyards there were a few pickings (early-to-mid-ripeners, then the others) for different co-fermentations – Eben hopes that the vineyards can be developed to allow single pickings and ferments at some future date.

As for the wines… let me start with the easy one, the red. Sonvang [“Sun catch”] was planted in 2021 with alicante bouschet, agiorgitiko, pontac, bastardo do castillo, trincadera, tinta barocca, lledoner pelut, grenache noir, pinotage, cinsaut, counoise and carignan – so don’t look for varietal character.

The wine is simply delicious. I use “simply” with ambiguity. It’s a lovely, seamless wine, the dried herbal and redfruit perfumed aromatics leading to a palate with gorgeous juicy tannins and a fresh lively acidity. Already it provides good drinking, but will probably gain volume and complexity with time in bottle – though, on a larger timescale, the vines having many more years in the ground will, I think, do even more for the wine.

Twiswind – the name means something like “Quarrelling wind” – is the highest of the three multi-varietal vineyards, and was planted in 2019 with vermentino, picpoul, marsanne, grenache blanc, cinsaut blanc, palominio, chenin blanc, grillo, assyrtiko, verdelho, clairette blanche and semillon.

I confess to  struggling with Twiswind (to negate any tension I can say that ultimately the wine won). For a day or two I was sampling from an already-two-day-open bottle that Eben gave me, though there was no lack of freshness. My scribbled notes had words like: intense – ripe tropicality – citrus (lime) and floral – open, fresh, bracing, powerful; grippy. I felt I could imagine the wine coming from that hot hillside. And I understood the expressive significance of the amost lurid, lime-green capsule. I tried not to think: a bit lime-sour. But I wasn’t at all sure whether I liked the wine. And it’s certainly not unusual for me to get really confused by a wine.

Before dinner on the next day, I opened a fresh bottle and compared the two. Obviously a lot in common. The older bottle still retained power and freshness and certainly, there was more vigour, vitality in the newly-opened bottle, though perhaps less obvious punch (the limeyness seems to grow with time). But the suspicion remained of a lack of deliciousness, a feeling that perhaps this vineyard was too young to produce a wine I actually wanted to drink. I poured a glass to have with my dinner – a sort of deconstructed avocado Ritz, with plenty of flavour and richness. I’m a sceptic when it comes to food and wine pairing, and tend to feel it’s a fallback to talk about a wine needing food. But this experience was vital to my judgement of Twiswind, because having it with suitable food transformed my relationship with the wine. It was a wonderful experience. The level in the bottle went down as the plate emptied and the pages of my book turned.

I look forward to the experience of a formal tasting of these two wines in the context of the rest of the new releases: Sonvang alongside the grenache and the cinsaut; but especially Twiswind, which I think will contrast greatly with the established range. That should be in a few weeks, and I’ll hope to report back here on the whole lot – the Sadie range has now expanded to, if I count correctly, eleven wines. But Eben says that’s it. Hmmm.

• Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution appeared in 2013.