Hardys is big enough that most drinkers meet it on a supermarket shelf, which neatly hides what the house actually is. Strip away the volume labels and you find one of the oldest continuous names in Australian wine, still routing its best fruit into a tier that has to earn its keep.
Thomas Hardy bought a riverbank property he called Bankside on the Torrens in 1853 and planted three-quarters of an acre of Shiraz. He shipped wine to England before the decade was out, bought the Tintara cellars in McLaren Vale, and by the 1890s was the colony's largest producer and, in the local press, the father of South Australian wine.
The flagship carries the name of Eileen Hardy, the family matriarch. Shiraz remains the spine of the house, behind well over a hundred of its bottlings, but the Eileen Hardy Chardonnay is the wine critics reach for first, scored 96 by Wine Advocate alongside high marks for the Shiraz and a cool-grown Pinot Noir.
What makes Hardys interesting is not the heritage plaque. It is that a company built on selling wine by the case still concentrates its finest parcels into a single label and lets it stand or fall on the score, which is a discipline plenty of smaller, prouder estates never impose on themselves.
South Australia
