Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/348953
110 { THE SOMM JOURNAL } AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2014 W { discoveries } With his jeans, teeshirt, silver-streaked beard and mile-wide smile, Adi Badenhorst is a winemaker with cowboy wildness and seat-of-the-pants ebullience. That he produces wines of elegance, freshness and oxidative restraint is not irony; it's what the land has told him to do. "It's a frikking long story, man," he says. "Very complex." We first met in April 2011 in a liquor store in Jackson, Mississippi, where he introduced his wares to gushing locals. Many thought him gek (Afrikaans for foolish) when he resigned as winemaker at Rustenberg in Stellenbosch to found A. A. Badenhorst Family Wines with his cousin. Yet, the buoyant Badenhorst doesn't make wine for glory, ratings or money. From the moment I met Adi, the gentle force of his personality sug - gested that he simply conjured nectar from any old plot. Turns out, it was the other way around: The Swartland summoned it from him. Badenhorst explains: "The sun shines fiercely, vegeta - tion is sparse, the buildings and people are humble and honest, and the old vineyards with memories of hard summers need to dig deep into their souls to achieve ripeness." Celebrated winemaker and fellow Swartland revolutionary Eben Sadie sums it up: "The place is so powerful, it dictates to you in one season." Swartland hasn't much of a track record in the U.S. (yet), but American wine curios - ity has never been higher and Badenhorst and Sadie alone are worth the leap of faith across the Atlantic, the equator, the Prime Meridian and nearly 8,000 miles from JFK to Johannesburg. Far removed from South Africa's 1990s U.S. invasion—when wines were tinged like cork taint with the stink of apart - heid—the most exciting wines today aren't coming from the Cape, but from Swartland and points north: non-manipulated wines that speak of place and vintage variation. "Old World is for settlers and New World is for pioneers," explains Sadie. "The Swartland landscape is hard, the yields are extremely low, the varieties are obscure and there aren't many good coffee shops around. You have to come here with drive." Rising from these harsh conditions, derelict vineyards are resurrected to make wines that are anything but generic. "Old bushvines with deep root structure and fresh, quirky wines with insanely concentrated fruit and gorgeous minerals. It's a special piece of dirt," says Ryan Woodhouse, South Africa Wine Buyer for California's K&L Wine Merchants, a Wine Retailer of the Year nominee. New World Geography, Old World Philosophy As of the global 2013 harvest, South Africa is the eighth-largest wine-producing nation (between Chile and Germany). Yet 43% of the 600+ producers are vinifying less than 100 tons of Eben Sadie in the vineyards: "The place is so powerful, it dictates to you in one season." PHOTO: MAREE LOUW Adi Badenhorst is one of Swartland's most ardent proponents. PHOTO COURTESY OF BROADBENT WINES A. A. Badenhorst Secateurs red blend is an exemplary Swartland wine.