Charlotte Adams Alsaadi writes Charlotte is a food & wine marketing consultant based in Philadelphia. She holds a master’s degree in Wine & Vineyard Sciences from the University of Bordeaux’s Institut des sciences de la vigne et du vin (ISVV) and has done harvests in Alsace and Pennsylvania. She likes the cold, sourdough baking, and South African whites, though one mountain Grenache recently stole her heart…
The thief in the night
A creamy sun melted into the early December sky. Cape Town’s usual rumble was quieted, but a steady hum hung in the air, attuning my presence like cows before rain. It was my last night in South Africa, the culmination of two full weeks in the Eastern and Western capes. I had been spoiled by this country: Tsitsikamma kayaking, Mossel Bay ziplining, a safari in KwaZulu-Natal, pizza night at Kalmoesfontein, and winemaker visits for days. The only stop left was Publik, a small wine bar tucked away on an unsuspecting street, known for its rotating list of the country’s best new-wave wines. Having worked with South African wines in the U.S. for a few years, I was well aware of Publik’s clout among vinophiles.
We arrived in the most appropriately laundered clothes we could find for our last night out, my husband a bit weary-eyed after my mad dashes across the winelands the past week, from Somerset West to Riebeek-Kasteel, then Piket-bo-Berg to Paarl. We sat at the bar, our backs to the open accordion windows, and ordered two glasses of pét-nat. To my right sat a reserved but amiable man who had just started on a bottle of Chenin by a rising young winemaker. He offered us a glass, and the conversation quickly revealed his keen knowledge of the industry, rattling off vintage variations of cult wines like a kid singing his ABCs, cheerful but too innocent for airs.
I decided to ask my new friend for his “last bottle” pick. If he were me, on his last night in South Africa, what would he order? Without hesitation or even a glance at the menu, he replied, “Savage Thief in the Night Grenache.” I knew of this producer—and of Grenache’s quiet rise as the poster child of drought and heat tolerance in a warming world—but had never tried this one from Piekenierskloof. Trusting in his conviction, I ordered a bottle.
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My earliest Grenache memories date back to a serving job at a neighborhood wine bar in D.C., where a Côtes du Rhône blend was one of my four shift drink options. It didn’t wow me, and I often opted instead for what we affectionately called the BJ (Belle Jardin Blanc de Blancs), but the Grenache-dominant blend holds a cozy spot in my heart, the just-right choice at the end of a raw winter night. Still, with time, I came to find that Grenache often lacked the sex appeal of a silky Syrah, its ever-paired partner, or the command of a left bank Cab. It lacked intrigue, condemned to the rules of old recipes.
A few years later, my tune started to change. It was an early summer night, the kind that still calms with cool, kinetic air, and I sat on my condo balcony in a suburb of Philadelphia. I was low-spirited; the jingle of Bordeaux’s tram and walkable streets left me longing for life’s last chapter. I had brought home a bottle of Grenache from a work tasting, and with no plans as a 27-year-old suburbanite, I sliced into some Comté and poured a glass. The first sip was one I’ll always remember, immediately zinging my focus to yet another chapter: childhood in Vermont, picking blueberries, the smell of warm, crushed fruit turning to jam in the honeyed sun. And then I was in Maine, older, camping in Acadia’s pine forests, the cool undercurrent of forest air rising from humus and rock. It was a bottle of S.C. Pannell Old McDonald Grenache, a South Australian wine that transported me home to the north, licking my wounds, stirring life in my body like worms in the dirt.
Over the years there have been others: Lourens Family Lua Ilse, a sacred splash of Rayas, even the white kind from Wolf & Woman. But it was Duncan Savage’s Thief in the Night that gave this variety a new dimension for me: polarity. It was light, buoyant, almost rhythmic in its gait, and yet consequential, grounded, like the rhapsodic range of Joni Mitchell in one breath. It was fitting for a variety that I had so long overlooked to wrap the bow on a trip I never thought I’d take, to seal my adoration of this country and its people. Like the lift and load of this mountain wine, each quality a prerequisite for the other, I saw South African culture as the result of reciprocal functions. It clicked into meaning: their lack of government support as a cause for camaraderie, power outages a spark for uniting energy.
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Sitting by the window as night fell, I felt a cool gust of ocean air, an immediate relief from the fire of day. I thought about Grenache’s ability to make a wine of confounding proportions, all at once big and small, heavy and light. I thought about its value as a torchbearer for vivid, fresh styles of wine globally, how it can handle an x-ray sun, holding on to acid well after other varieties lose their will. And then, how it can tell the story of a place, a tiny little plot on a faraway plateau, yet belong to something bigger, calling out as an answer for drinkability worldwide.
We walked home under a quilted sky, the soft embers of afterglow resting at the edge of the wrinkled sea. The thief in the night was at work, stealing a sliver of day. Well, something’s lost but something’s gained…
The image of a South African vineyard at sunset is the author's own.
