Eben Sadie (Priorat), Spain
A South African in Spain
Falset is not a big place in the Priorat, so when you arrive armed with only a few words of Spanish and the assurance that you can ask anyone on the street where the South African winemaker lives, you're delighted, not daunted by the poetic volatility of it all. Five pm and it's still siesta time in these rural parts. A wine shop is lazily opening and I'm about to gather some mangled Spanish into a question regarding the whereabouts of the South African. Then a shout as my travelling companion jumps from the car and goes running down the street, leaving the door open.
He's spotted a woman with two kids - Eben Sadie's wife, Magriet, it so happens; coincidentally out to get some milk from the shop.
"That's how it is out here. If you were meant to find me, you would," is Sadie's unfazed response that evening.
His approval of the nature of my arrival reflects his phlegmatic philosophy of life and winemaking, useful here where a forced approach can be a cosmic blunder.
It's harvest time and most other wineries are hard at work bringing in mainly Garnacha (Grenache) and Cariñena (Carignan). He's in paint-splattered overalls, getting the tiny cellar space ready in a dash against ripeness. In this world, if you want something done, you do it yourself, he explains. Where villages are separated by hairpin bends and steep valleys, a machine repair is not a convenient phone call away. Self-reliance is survival.
Hurtling around those bends like we're in a rally the next day, it's obvious driving is a lusty pastime in these parts, along with soporific lunches and cold dawns on precipitous terrace slopes, hand-picking and sorting the bunches in the vineyard.
Making wine in Priorat is a dance between frantic bursts of action and stagnant periods of waiting. The landscape is epic and sullen and seems to have waited for centuries. Broken mountain ranges give way to searing valleys where villages grow from the rock. We're being driven to one of these towns on a narrow winding road at a speed that mocks all this slow and ancient land around us. But a sluggish drive would take up too much time, they point out, and if you need help or window frames for the cellar (as is now the case), you can't just slip down to the centre of town. You make a few dramatic crossings with the steering wheel whipping from side to side to the village across the way where the carpenter lives.
The primal landscape is crowned by the beautiful Monsant range that both delimits and climatically controls the region. Priorat has 1500-odd hectares of vine. Around 500 farmers are active, making for intense viticulture. The tiny, remote fincas (vineyards) don't allow for mechanisation and the yearly harvest here averages 2 400 tons, compared to the 367 000 plus of Rioja. In spite of these extreme growing conditions, wine dynasties and wine reputations thrived here in the pre-phylloxera years. Then war and disease came and the families left or dwindled.
Most agree Ren® Barbier initiated the Priorat revival, and the names Clos Mogador, Clos Martinet and L'Ermita became renowned in the '90s, with wines that can sell today for a staggering 500 euros.
There are active signs of bigger vineyards being cleared, but the region is still packed with small bodegas in tiny hamlets, which are also seeing a renewal.
A few years ago, Eben Sadie tasted what he called "perfect" wines from a region he had never heard of: the 1992 Clos Martinet and the 1992 Clos Mogador. A quest began that led to his working a few vintages in some of these cellars and then, in 2001, the first vintage of his own-label Dits del Terra - "fingers of the earth" - a name that captures the artisanal nature of wine-making here, as well as the heightened focus on the character of place. The vineyards have the distinctive personality that comes with age. Many are over a century old, though Sadie's nearly four hectares are planted to "younger" vines that are 60 to 80 years old.
The climate is harsh and in summer these unirrigated vineyards are at the end of their tether and sumptuously ripe. To call a wine "Origin Priorat", it must have an alcohol of 14% or higher. However, these huge wines challenge the notion that alcohol leads to imbalanced wines. These reds are rich, but not hot. They're robust, but not clumsy. For Sadie, it's in the vine age and the unique soils, called llicorella, that support meagre crops, often half a ton per hectare. It's also the unique narrow valleys with aspects that allow the grapes to ripen slowly and evenly over an extraordinarily long period.
Dits del Terra 2001 spent 18 months in the seven barrels that contained Sadie's full crop. The vinification was straightforward. "In vinification nothing of essential value can be introduced," he believes, "but a great deal can be lost."
Native yeasts, manual punch-downs, no pumps and basket-pressing and the wines go into the bottle unfined and unfiltered. The concentration of fruit is remarkable, as is the broad structure of the wine, but it is the tannic structure of the integrated fruit and wood, and the freshness that make it remarkable. Something like the place - the landscape looks raw, but it's vibrant. There's an ageless vitality that is retained and to some extent tamed in the best of the highly individualistic wines of the "new" Priorat. Best of all, these wines are as far from generic as you are likely to get.
Eben's claim to fame in South Africa, Eben Sadie has made wines under the Sadie Family label since 2000. He was winemaker at Charles Back's Swartland winery Spice Route from 1998 to 2000. His Columella 2000 (a blend of 90% Shiraz and 10% Mourv®®dre) was rated 5 Stars in the 2003 Platter guide. He was also responsible for the Spice Route Flagship Syrah 2000, which won a grand gold medal and was judged best red wine of the competition at the 2003 Concours Mondial de Bruxelles.
