Regular Harry on Eben Sadie tasting – he’s back!

It was a privilege and an honour to be serving the wines of Eben Sadie at the latest Under the Influence tasting last night. Another honour was to have the pen of Regular Harry (Harry Haddon), South Africa’s quickly up and coming wine writer, please visit his blog to see some of his humorous and insightful and sometimes controversial posts. Here is his take on the Eben Sadie tasting last night!

Eben on his home ground

I haven’t been the most regular of visitors to the Under the Influence tastings lately, and as such it seems I have gone from ‘regular Harry ’to‘dirty Harry’. I timed my return well, as last night we tasted the wines of Eben Sadie. The only real hitch was that Eben was not there. He was in Spain working on the wines he makes in the Priorat – but more on that later.

To be honest I was almost happy that the guy wasn’t there as listening to him speak about his wines as you taste them it makes it very difficult to offer any sort of unbiased assessment. The vigour with which he describes his techniques and wine-making philosophy are contagious, and I found it impossible – at the same tasting last year – to offer anything but the highest praise. I wanted to see how much Eben had influenced my tasting.

Some say that Sadie simply “believes his own bullshit”. I think this is probably fair, but one must remember that this ‘bullshit’ is making unquestionably good wines. To make up for the lack of Sadie in person we were presented with one of the Wine Bandits’ videos that shows Eben prattling on for 20min about soil when he was asked to speak for 3. It is definitely worth a watch.

What amused me in the video was how Eben dismissed the wine making habits of the 80’s and 90’s saying there was too much focus on the cellar and less in the vineyard; that it was about being a rock star wine maker rather than producing terroir driven wines. The funny thing is that Eben in the first rock star wine maker from South Africa, being heralded as the country’s only ‘celebrity winemaker’.

After that we started tasting the wines. We started with his ‘entry level’ (around R140 a pop) Sequillo wines before moving on to the Palladius and Columella and finally onto two of Eben’s wines from Priorat.

The tasting was conducted by our big, wine loving Serbian friend Dusan – you may remember him from some of our more extravagant vinous exploits at the bottom of The Roundhouse’s garden.

The Sequillo 2009 is made from Chenin Blanc, Grenache Blanc, Viognier, and Roussanne. This vintage sees the wine becoming a little leaner and fruiter with less of the overt oxidativeness (new word. Do you like it?) I found in the 2008. The Chenin and Viognier seem to dominate the nose with pineapple straw and peach skin, being the most evident to me. The palate had an incredible density and weight that was thick and powerful whilst still managing to be clean and fresh. According to Dusan the grapes are picked by 10 to 30 local women and part of the wines’ success is owed to this.

Difficult as it was to pull ourselves away from the morish Sequillo White we had to move on to the red version from 2006. The nose was typical Swatland for me: Sour cherries and red dust. The palate was savoury – like bacon smelt from a distance – and remarkably fresh. The wine still had good fruit with dark cherry on the palate and some brooding blackberry (a blackberry with a frown). The best aspect of Eben’s wines is their freshness and weight. I find that many wines that exhibit density and weight on the palate do not finish with elegance and freshness. This wine was like a bull in a china shop wearing a tutu and roller-skates which pirouettes whilst singing opera in a falsetto, and doesn;t break a thing.

The big boys were up next. The Palladius 2008, which won Platter’s white wine of the year for 2010 was first. A blend of Chenin Blanc, Grenache Blanc, Roussanne, Marsanne, Viognier,Clairette and Chardonnay; it is a supremely good wine. A very spicy nose – a touch of nutmeg perhaps? – with some straw like character and some lemony zest. It is complex with aromas shifting and changing the longer it was swirled in the glass. When Dusan asked the room what they thought of the wine it was incredible to hear “clean cut” and “crisp” being shouted from the back of the room. Now this is one MoFo of a wine, large, thick, and very complex. Words in a white wine that do not normally associate with “clean cut” and “crisp”. Such is the talent of Mr Sadie (or the talent of the soils he works with). The Palladius is extremely complex, and on the palate I found cinnamon, lemon, lots of crushed stone minerality, and strangely an earthy, almost loamy character that I have not tasted on a white wine before. Above all the wine is poised and balanced. As someone said, “a fat man doing ballet”, and I’ll add, perfectly.

The Columella 2007 was a wine that I had been looking forward to and with an imploring look and a “wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more, say no more” I managed to wrangle a fuller glass. And although there were some at the table who expected more from this wine I could not have been more happy. The nose was very perfumed, think rose water and lavender. The palate was dense and full of blackberries, mulberries and leather with full frontal minerality. All of this heavy and dense, but it was like a lead riding weightlessly on a bubble of acidity letting it still be a pleasure to drink. This blend of Syrah and Mouvedre just goes on and on in the palate. It was time to try the Spanish wines and yet I was still sitting there smacking my lips eking out every last smidgen of flavour the wine had to offer.

Time pressed on and so did we, begrudgingly. Founded in 2001 Eben Sadie and Dominik A. Huber formed Terroir Al Limit producing wines from the Priorat region in Spain. The region is hilly and them old vines – between 50 and a hundred year old – grow on steep slopes producing wines of intense concentration and vigour. We tasted two wines, the Dits Tel Corra 2003 (also a rather pricy wine, a trawl around the interwebs sees it being flogged for around $100) and the Priorat Torroja del Priorat 2007. The first was rich and spicy with a very smooth palate, also quite earthy and mineral. The length of the fruit was incredible almost arriving right at the end after everything else had dissipated.

The second wine, which is the generic blend from all the vineyards in the area, was tight and dense also showing great freshness and length. There was a dark currant character and some minerality. Another wine that was dense but light on its feet.

The last wine and arguably the strangest was the Mrs Kirstens 2006. A Chenin Blanc made from old bush vines. How old? Well no one seems to be sure, but they are very old, let us take the average and call them 90 plus. It is easily South Africa’s most expensive Chenin coming it at around R800 and in a restaurant you will be paying at least double that. Made in very small quantities it is a treat to taste this oddball wine. Produced in a very oxidative style there is a brandy like element to the wine as well as a very mineral core. Brendon from the cru tweeted this morning that the Mrs Kirstens was “…an enigma! that looked like liquid gold with sediment floating around in it like gold flakes. The response was that for the price one would hope it is gold.

I think I was far too greedy and drank it far too quickly. It needed another 30min in the glass I am sure. Some like it some don’t, but what I am convinced off is that it will age for a very long time.

To finish off Dusan read some lines from a poem by Pablo Neruda, fittingly “An Ode to Wine” Here are they are:

My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your nipples are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendour of life.

Thus rounded off another superb tasting with Under the Influence. I, as usual, stayed as long as possible trying to drink every remaining drop.