Vertical Tasting of Sadie Family Wines Columella

I first met Eben Sadie in 2002, on my initial visit to South Africa’s beautiful Cape region. Prior to the trip, I had heard rumors from my spies about a fascinating new “garage” wine that was going to shake up the South African wine industry. Along with several other tasters from Europe and Australia, I was in Paarl as an international judge for the annual South African wine competition, and I invited Sadie to present his new wine, called Columella, to us at our hotel one evening before we were scheduled to leave for dinner.

Sadie was late. We waited for about half an hour, then gave up and assembled in the front hall. That’s when Sadie blew in, a bottle in one hand and a box of glasses in the other. At a table in the foyer, as the mini-buses waited for us in the courtyard, he poured us a taste of his first vintage, the 2000, which had recently been bottled. We were stunned by the complexity and wildness of the wine; it was head and shoulders above 99% of what we had been tasting at our wine competition. It was clear that a star had been born.

Cut to 2014. On a clear dry day this past September, at Hearth Restaurant in New York City, Sadie presented what he said was the first vertical tasting of all finished vintages to date of Columella, beginning with the 2000. As I had previously had the chance to taste every vintage but never a large group of vintages on the same table, this extraordinary event proved to me that Columella, which has always been based on Syrah, is one of the half dozen or so most complex, rich and ageworthy collectible red wines made anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. And Sadie has taken Columella to an even higher level in recent years.