What Eben Sadie Taught Me About Wine Subtractionism

This piece was written over a bottle of Treinspoor 2023 from Sadie Family Wines, from South Africa's Swartland. Winemakers website (Great winery name btw – it very clearly states that this isn't one-man-show, but fruit of labour of an entire family — very endearing.)

100% Tinta Barroca. A variety originating in Portugal's Douro, where it plays an important role in Port blends. It arrived in South Africa in the first half of the 20th century, when fortified wines were very popular there. In this case, old bush vines, trained as gobelet.

It was clear immediately after opening that I'd opened the bottle too early. This uncompromising, 100% Tinta Barroca comes from a single vineyard that is over fifty years old, planted next to an old Swartland railway line.

The wine's aesthetic is deeply rustic, wild, and almost ascetically pure, with no coating of new oak or crowd-pleasing fruitiness. Its expression is dominated by raw elegance, earthiness, the scent of freshly turned soil, graphite, and crushed stone.

On the palate, it's tremendously energetic, direct, and masculine, while retaining a surprising inner freshness and tension. Its firm, chalky-gripped tannic structure and vertical build bring to mind certain famous wines from Piedmont. Like great Nebbiolo, it shows a captivating contrast between a lighter, more delicate appearance and enormous, gripping power in the finish.

It also shares an aromatic complexity and wildness with some wines from Cornas in the northern Rhône (a certain detail of this wine reminds me of Thierry Allemand's wines), or with the best traditional examples from Portugal's Douro, like Niepoort's Charme.

It's a deeply intellectual, characterful wine made for lovers of pure terroir, with decades of flawless aging ahead of it.

It was precisely this experience with the Treinspoor that got me thinking about how fundamentally Eben Sadie defines the aesthetic of wine through the concept of subtractionism — the art of deliberate, radical removal of elements in order to expose the very core.

This idea resonates with movements that sought, in both art and architecture, an absolute purity of form. It calls to mind the approach of the Japanese Mono-ha masters of the 1960s, who rejected the traditional Western concept of creation as "man reshaping matter." Artists like Lee Ufan instead took raw, unshaped materials — boulders, granite, glass, or steel sheets — and simply placed them into minimalist relationships with one another.

We find the same principle of subtractionism in postwar Brutalist architecture, or in the pure concrete structures of Tadao Ando, where the absence of any decoration shifts the entire aesthetic weight onto the texture of the raw material and the interplay of light and shadow.

In the aesthetics of wine, subtractionism is a great analogy. Wine naturally possesses its own language, which is, however, often obscured by layers of external aesthetic noise. Sadie strips away from the wine's texture everything that might distract your attention. By eschewing new oak, the aesthetic shifts away from surface-level aromatics toward structural rigor.

When you drink Treinspoor, you aren't judging an appealing composition — you're perceiving microdetails: the chalky tension on the palate, the earthy grain of the tannins, the salinity and vertical structure of the flavor.

The absence of makeup reveals the architecture of the vintage and the place in its purest, rawest form.

This lesson in radical subtraction immediately put me on the trail of other creators around the world who share the same purist code and reject any attempt at crowd-pleasing.

I sense a similar structural intransigence and granite-like rawness in the legendary Hermitages from Jean-Louis Chave, or in traditional, hard-to-grasp Barolos that ignore modern oak roundness. All these wines, like Sadie's Treinspoor, consciously renounce a loud, fruity face in order to reveal the crystalline material tension beneath.

This shift also changes the role of the consumer. Once a wine is stripped of external effects, there's no room left for passive consumption — active observation becomes necessary.

Subtractionism demands a different kind of attention — it forces us to slow down and adapt to the wine's inner rhythm, rather than to our immediate sensory demands.

The aesthetic experience thus moves from the plane of instant gratification to the plane of contemplation, where even apparent austerity becomes a fascinating material detail.

In the end, Treinspoor 2023 taught me the most important thing: to reset my own scales and criteria. Wine's value doesn't grow with how loudly it shouts at my senses, but with how deeply it can draw me into the silence from which it came.

I realized that true beauty isn't hidden in the layers a human has layered onto the wine, but in what remains once the ego steps back.

I leave this bottle knowing that the most beautiful wines aren't the ones that give me instant answers, but the ones that force me to ask the right questions.