2012 Sequillo (Eben Sadie) Red Blend Swartland

Staff Reviews

RW

Ryan Woodhouse

Ryan Woodhouse

Wow! This wine is off the charts good. It has pure, bright aromatics of deep, spicy crushed berries, ripe currants, red fleshy plum, granite, and toasted spices and dark red floral tones. The wine is rich and layered but precise and focused. The fruit shows macerated raspberries, logan fruit, dark cherry hints with subtle leather, charred meat and dusty mineral tones showing through the purity of fruit. There is an intense soil quality to this wine that is equally impressive as the quality and fruit and floral tones. A complex wine that I love for it's combination of power, purity and subtlety all combined into one slick package. An insane value thanks to our direct import.

Notes

The Sequillo Red is made from Syrah, Cinsault and Tinta Barocca. It is selected from multiple parcels of Eben's vines throughout the Swartland region. The fruit is carefully hand-picked and naturally fermented in 1300-gallon cement tanks. The wine spends about 6 weeks on the skins for slow, gentle extraction and is then pressed off with a small basket press. This wine hearkens back to the Châteauneuf-du-Pape of old with a perfect combination of purple flowers, exotic dark red fruits, stoney earth tones, leather, warm spices and smoked meat. The 2012 vintage was amazing and all of the grapes were picked for this wine prior to the heat waves, which resulted in a wonderful brigthness. An increased Cinsault percentage in the blend provided freshness and lifted fruit resulting in one of the best Sequillo wines ever. From Eben:"Sequillo comes from the Latin and means 'an arid, dry place of great purity'; a very good description of the Swartland in South Africa. It is the Swartland that we strive to capture in our Sequillo wines, vintage after vintage. Our wines must reflect their soils and have a strong sense of place; and this expression of place must be unrefined and unfiltered. We strive to produce wines which are unique and honest and that rather display minerality and origin as opposed to more opulent flavours."