MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Sadie wines’ remarkable 25-year trajectory

Sadie Family Wines has been around for almost 25 years — not a long time compared with the Antinoris and Frescobaldis, who have been at it for about 800 years, but it has followed a remarkable trajectory in that limited time. In the context of the New World, Sadie’s is a singular achievement.

The vision that made this cellar the Cape’s equivalent of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti had no prior model anywhere in the world. Eben Sadie’s career launched at Spice Route in the heady days of post-1994 SA. The brand was a joint venture between John Platter (of the eponymous guide fame), Gyles Webb (Thelema) Charles Back (Fairview) and Jabulani Ntshangase (ex-Cape Classics in New York). As the Spice Route founding partners began to go their separate ways, Sadie — not yet 30 years old — conceived a new kind of wine enterprise with a new kind of identity.

At the time, what he had in mind had never even been imagined in the context of SA. We think of him as the pioneer protagonist in the quest for old vines. But what preceded this, what came before the process of identifying the vineyards, was an almost philosophical idea of the wine itself. Sadie envisaged only two wines, a red and a white, each uniquely South African, composed of the oldest and most authentic Cape vineyards, expressions of their terroirs rather than of single sites. In this sense they would be different from what could be produced anywhere else in the world. 

So what he imagined didn’t actually exist. He couldn’t even be sure that there would be the vineyards to supply the fruit. Even with the right sites, he couldn’t know whether the component parts would complement and marry, and if they were to work, in what proportions. To understand this is to have a way of comprehending the evolution of the two most venerated wines in the Sadie Family range — the Columella and the Palladius.

Both appear to have arrived in this world fully formed: in marketing terms, their design and packaging were perfect from the outset. They were visually iconic from the moment they appeared on the scene. But the wines themselves remained a work in progress for many years. Nothing can replace the testing time of bottle-ageing. For years I preferred to make the focus of my interest and my purchases the single-site wines launched some years later. Initially marketed under the rubric of Ouwingerdreeks, they now share common branding as “Distriksreeks.”

The latest releases are from the 2023 vintage. The reds share in common an aesthetic sparseness — as if to add anything would be to lose some of their purity, and to take anything away might make them flimsy. I tasted them all again three days after I had first opened them and all three had just reached their cruising altitude. The Treinspoor Tinta and the Soldaat Grenache might just have edged out the Pofadder Cinsault — but I’m not sure.

The same general comments apply to the whites. They too improved over the three days between opening and my second sampling. It would be hard not to put the Skerpioen (from a 90-year-old interplanted block of chenin and palomino) in the very front rank — saline and spectacularly intense. It shares that slot with the Skurfberg chenin from the late Basie van Lill’s farm — so fresh, yet so intense, like crystalline white balsamic. But as always, the Mev Kirsten chenin and the ’T Voetpad are worth their black market prices.

The 2022 Palladius (white) and Columella (red) have also just been released. This is the first time I have been completely convinced about the Columella — complex, multilayered, complete — with no single varietal note dominating. My great regret is that I never applied for a bigger allocation. In fact, for serious enthusiasts, the main problem with the Sadie wines is the difficulty in securing an allocation directly from the cellar. But put your name down on the waiting list — and hope.