David and Nadia Sadie are true vignerons. Whenever I spend time with them, we talk more about farming and viticulture (emphasis on culture!) than anything else. The husband-and-wife team visibly relish the intellectuality of being immersed in the specifics of a site and they work with a Burgundian attention to detail – whether that’s with their composting programmes, or their interplanting regime, or the number of picks they do on any one block during harvest.
This single-minded focus on quality starting in the vineyards, and their uncompromising precision, yields mesmerising wines in the glass across their portfolio, not just across their chenins – though it’s true to say that the pair have become synonymous with chenin and specifically with Swartland chenin. It's a thrill to present their 2025s to you here.
Order by midday, Tuesday 27th October
Rewind to 2010, the year of the (first) Swartland Revolution and when David and Nadia started out. They originally planned to make just two wines (if I had a pound for every South African winemaker who told me that…!): one white blend based on chenin (Aristargos) and one Mediterranean-inspired red blend (Elpidios).
But as they got to know the Swartland landscape better through farming it, the chenin obsession took root. Working with old bush-vine chenin vineyards (David and Nadia have been big proponents of South Africa’s Old Vine Project), they started to understand how the nuances in exposition and soil type expressed so differently in the different blocks they were working with. And they started to entertain the idea of bottling the best of these on their own, rather than blending them. As David says, ‘there’s a beauty to celebrating a single vineyard.’ With the 2014 vintage they took the plunge, bottling their first two single-vineyard chenins, Hoë-Steen and Skaliekop.
I adore their single-vineyard chenins but my own story with David and Nadia began with their multi-site chenin, a wine which I still feel does not get the attention it deserves and which I’ve loved since I first tasted it over a decade ago. It is a blend of Old Vine Project certified vineyards, each farmed with the same meticulous attention, and it provides a snapshot of the Swartland in a way that a single vineyard can never do. It is often approachable a little sooner than the single site wines AND it ages just as beautifully.
The stunning 2025 vintage has given me the perfect excuse (as if I needed one!) to launch The Society’s debut David & Nadia First Release. As well as offering their four core wines, we have put together a mixed case of chenin featuring three of their single vineyards which I expect will fly (sadly the production of Hoë -Steen this vintage is just too minuscule).
If you are new to these wines, don’t be in a hurry to get them out of your Reserves (the reds can in fact be approached before the whites). These are wines of understated beauty and subtlety, characteristics that can be missed in their youth. They will blossom with time, and their quiet intensity and inherent vitality is completely intoxicating with bottle age. We drank a bottle of the 2017 Hoë-Steen this August, sitting outside in the London sunshine, and it was breathtaking.
