For someone who claims to travel so rarely from his Swartland base in the arid hinterland of Cape Town, Eben Sadie is remarkably well connected globally.
I caught up with him and his older son Markus a few weeks ago in the rather unlikely setting of the 17th-century offices of Sadie Family Wines’ UK importer Berry Bros & Rudd, shown above. He had just made his first visit to the English countryside for 25 years. ‘I’ve had a chlorophyll overdose’, was his reaction to immersion in English vineyards in springtime. ‘They’re beautiful and, because my career has been filled with a pioneering spirit, I understand English wine producers well.’
‘Pioneer’ is probably the word most often applied to Sadie. In 1998, at the age of only 26, he was put in charge of Charles Back of Fairview’s groundbreaking Spice Route wine operation in Swartland, then much better known for cereals than wine. He saw the potential of the region and decided to strike out on his own there. At that point, Swartland’s ancient bush vines on mixed farms were providing bulk wine for co-ops rather than characterful raw material for the new wave of young South African vintners who followed in Sadie’s wake.
He was sharply criticised by South African wine-drinkers for the price at which he launched the first 2000 vintage of his flagship red Columella. And that might have been the end of Sadie Family Wines, had it not been for English wine importer Roy Richards of Richards Walford. ‘There was no Plan B’, Sadie admitted, ‘but thanks to Roy, who financed the bottling of our first two vintages, there’s a little bit of England in all our wines.
‘I’d tasted briefly with him at the London Wine Fair. So when he came to South Africa in 2001, I made sure he tasted all the components of my 2000 and 2001. He said the wines were excellent and agreed to buy half of them. He sent the money the next week. He’s cut from another piece of wood that man and has had an immense influence on my life.’
The UK remains Sadie Family’s number-one export market ‘by a country mile’, followed by various other northern European countries. Americans took a while to be converted – perhaps partly because of general ignorance of the wine’s provenance. ‘They thought Robert Mugabe was our president’, observed Sadie. But thanks to US importers Eric Solomon and then Broadbent Selections, once American wine-drinkers tasted Sadie Family wines (now joined by a series of great whites), they were hooked. Today, Sadie Family wines are by far the most expensive and most sought-after South African wines in the US.
According to Bartholomew Broadbent, who points out that in 2017 the Masters of Wine voted Sadie the Winemakers’ Winemaker, ‘He is really one of the greatest winemakers in the world. Also, a dream to interview because he is opinionated and a great philosopher. Probably the best in the wine world today since [the late] Serge Hochar [of Lebanon’s Chateau Musar] is no longer able to claim that mantle’.
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