Eben Sadie Palladius 2016

Wine of the Year, White Blend, Platter's 2020 Wine

From some of the oldest fields on the Paardeberg mountain in the Swartland, the grapes come to Eben Sadie's top white wine. The soil offers i.a. on gravel and granite, and the grapes all come from old vines that stand like shrubs. Palladius is composed of Chenin Blanc, Grenache Blanc, Clairette Blance, Viognier, Chardonnay, Rousanne, Semilllon, Palomino Fino and several lesser known grapes. The grapes are harvested in the early morning hours before they are sorted grape by grape to find the perfectly ripe and clean grapes.

Then they are pressed in an old basket press. After fermentation, the wine is stored in a mixture of clay amphorae, French oak vessels and a few 600-liter concrete vessels. The wine is neither filtered nor clarified before being bottled. After 1-2 hours in the carafe, the wine really opens up with a nice aroma with shades of lemon, almond, peach, yellow flowers and limestone. On the tongue, the wine is overwhelmingly intense and at the same time smooth, like only the greatest wines. The acidity sits perfectly and keeps the wine in excellent balance combined with the intense and mineral-like taste nuances. A unique white wine in a wine world where the wines are more and more similar.


Eben Sadie is educated and has worked among the world's best winemakers. Today, he tries to take wine production back to an absolute minimum, where no terroir and taste nuances are manipulated. Eben Sadies eget ord: "We live in an ever more globalized world where wine permutated to become more alike daily. Within this the notion of terroir is to be lost forever. Wine more than any other produce of agriculture has a specific notion of origin, hence every wine in the world having an "appellation" status. Our goal and aim is for our wines to display the true character of our soils and the vintage factor within any year. This entitles the development of a define sensitivity for the area and the grapes, the biggest notion is to let things go go at time and to rather become an observer and preserver than a "maker". The notion of sense of place is what wines are about and the reason they have fascinated mankind since the very inception. "

On the bottle he writes:
This wine is the product of respect for the cultivation of the land and for natural vinification methods. Pofadder forms part of the Old Vine Series, all handcrafted from very old Cape vineyards farmed by The Sadie Family. Utmost care has been taken to preserve the character of the terroir.