2014 Skurfberg

Eben Sadie, who put the Swartland on the map as a source of outstanding fruit and world-class wine with the release of his first (2000) vintage of Columella, has spent the last 15 years of his life finding and resuscitating the region's very old bush vines. Columella and its white sibling Palladius, which have brought Sadie his greatest international renown, are "appellation" wines made from vines in multiple sites around Swartland, as Sadie does not believe that any one vineyard or soil type could ever represent the terroir of the entire appellation.

But his old-vines series, featuring wines from single blocks of vines (none of these latter wines show a variety or varieties on the front label), now accounts for 60% of his annual production of about 4,500 bottles, and the best of them are stunning. In fact, the whites were among the most fascinating and complex wines of my April tour of the Cape.