Andrew Unsworth visits Sabi Sabi game reserve and can’t wait to go again. And again. And again The good people who run Earth Lodge, the flagship lodge of Sabi Sabi private game reserve, must be used to living with a certain degree of danger, as the lodge is unfenced.That may explain why they invited a small group of journalists on a recent weekend to witness, and to help a little, in the bottling of two casks of wine, which had been maturing in their cellar for four years.It must surely have been the first time that wine from Stellenbosch had ever been bottled in the Lowveld, and the first put into bottles by journalists rather than taken out.Sabi Sabi owners Hilton and Jacqui Loon bought the wine on a visit to their supplier, Stellenrust wine estate, near Stellenbosch, in 2012 - enough for a barrel of cabernet, another of shiraz.story_article_left1The wine, in plastic containers, was transported, refrigerated, to Joburg and then on to the Mpumalanga Lowveld, at great expense.There it was put into new barrels and stored in the Earth Lodge's partly underground concrete cellar.Samples were regularly sent back to cellarmaster Tertius Boshoff, who even consulted with his oenology professor at Stellenbosch, until it was deemed fit to bottle.Tertius and his brothers Kobie van der Westhuizen, Julian Boshoff and Herman du Preez then all flew to Sabi Sabi to blend the wine with a newer vintage, bottle, cork and label it, all by hand - and all with us journos getting in the way. It took much of two days to bottle 600 bottles.That's hardly an economical way to produce wine but that was beside the point - it was done for the sake of doing it.And Sabi Sabi, which notably has a place on National Geographic's list of unique lodges of the world, does not go about anything in a timid way.One of the first eco-tourism lodges in South Africa, it was designed by SA architect Mohammed Hans and has striking, concrete-bunker-like buildings set back into a slope, so that the lodge and all rooms are approached through a wide concrete trench, only to open into huge rooms with a panoramic view over the bushveld and a dam.All the surfaces are unpainted plaster mixed with local sand and grass, which is left protruding from every surface, except the basins and baths, which are painted and highly varnished.Despite this brutalist architecture, the feel is of understated elegance and luxury.Manager Nadia Schoeman from Pretoria and assistant Luke Clarke McLeod from the Eastern Cape keep the service flowing almost unnoticed, the ultimate hosts.I asked Schoeman about the architecture."Yes," she said, "if you look at pictures you might be sceptical and people are, but once you are here, once you see all the natural light and the space, it makes a huge difference."Jacqui (Loon) wanted something out of the ordinary when finishing the lodge, and they tried a lot of things. One day a piece of wet plaster fell on the sandy, grassy ground, and when she picked it up and turned it over, she said, 'That's what my lodge should look like!'"McLeod tells how the lodge came to be decorated with rather dramatic wooden sculptures by Geoffrey Armstrong, from unique headboards to exotic benches and sculptures."When the lodge was built in 2,000, there were severe floods down the Sabie River, which even washed away lodges. It also washed down trees, including leadwoods, mahogany and zebrawoods. They were salvaged from the debris and Armstrong repurposed the wood while he lived on site for eight months.Some pieces are built into the lodge: the bar was built, then the structure around it, the huge table in the wine cellar was built there first and the cellar built around it."All this is but a backdrop and base for experiencing the rolling 65,000ha of bushveld and its animals, and there are few better places to see the latter.full_story_image_hright1Sabi Sabi, and other reserves in the Sabi Sands area, are not fenced where they meet the Kruger National Park, so animals are free to roam.Territorial ones, such as lions, tend to stay. Maybe they just prefer the class of tourists and fewer vehicles.Ranger Tayla McCurdy made it clear that she was not rushing to tick the big five boxes. We sat and watched a family of elephants playing and eating in a dry river bed for ages, a young four-month-old calf battling to climb up the bank until he landed on his backside, looked at us in embarrassment, and stomped off.We tracked a leopard out for his evening kill, totally indifferent to our presence. He came so close to our Landcruiser I could have patted his back while he passed, before stopping dead under the tracker's elevated seat. Eventually we left him to get on with his dinner.After darkness and cold fell, we stopped for gluhwein and a bit of stargazing in a clearing in the reserve, the stars and Milky Way spread spectacularly across the clear Lowveld sky.Having Scorpio and other constellations pointed out with a lazer pointer meant they made sense for the first time in my life.Twice we sat and watched lions with their cubs behaving like bored kids and being kicked away from teats by bored mothers.Then we sat and watched a male lion resting under a bush and looking up occasionally, he too looked bored. Lions usually look bored.Trying to get a perfect shot, I bumped my brand-new Earth Lodge cap off my head and it landed next to the Landcruiser, metres from the lion.McCurdy drew the line at getting it, despite my pleas. When we returned an hour later in the hope of finding it, the lion was lying with my cap at its feet.Five journalists had soon tweeted and facebooked my faux pas all over the place.mini_story_image_hleft2The weekend coincided with my birthday, which I had hoped to ignore but someone bust me and after dinner on the night of it, chef Coenie Kruger produced a cake, thankfully with only a token three candles, which was marched to our table by the staff, singing that song.Whoever invented that tradition should be sewn into a warthog skin and dropped off near a hungry lion.Anyway, every meal we had was a taste and texture sensation that outdid any b-day treat.From his Earth Lodge eggs Benedict, with spinach, mushrooms and truffle, to his welcome menu of a six-course dinner with paired wines, to his perfect open sandwiches for a light lunch, and his every-day, four-course dinner menu, he has us star-struck.He does not cook to recipes, has never left the country to explore the world of food, but is already so good. This food does not inspire you to greater heights, it just makes you dread going home to your own bog standards.Sabi Sabi ticks all the usual boxes when it comes to supporting local farmers and the local community, down to school sports teams.It ticked every other box I could imagine, except for one: when we arrived the Brexit referendum result had just been announced, I was dying of curiosity, but the TV in the lounge was out of order.Then again, by the time it was fixed, I had come to realise that nothing really matters in the bushveld and I had lost interest. And that, in the end, is why we love going, again and again.sub_head_start SPECIAL OFFER sub_head_endSabi Sabi has a special three-night fly-in package:• From R31,500 for three nights including return flights on Federal Air from Johannesburg to Sabi Sabi.• For details contact Sabi Sabi Reservations 011- 447-7172 or e-mail res@sabisabi.com.• The normal rate for a luxury suite at Sabi Sabi starts from R10,500 per person sharing per night at Bush Lodge, Little Bush Camp and Selati Camp, and R16,500 per person sharing per night at Earth Lodge...