Bec Hardy

There are few names in Australian wine that loom larger than Hardy. Thomas Hardy arrived in South Australia from England in 1850, became one of the first settlers in McLaren Vale, and built a business and a reputation substantial enough that he is routinely called the father of South Australian wine. For the better part of two centuries, his descendants have worked the trade in one form or another. As part of the sixth generation Bec Hardy inherited not just a surname but a very particular set of expectations.

Bec’s particular distinction is that she is the first woman in the family to own vineyards and make wine under her own name. That this took until the sixth generation says something about how the industry was structured for most of its history. 

The groundwork for the business was laid by Bec’s father. In 1980, Geoff Hardy left the family business, Hardys, to make his own way, purchasing the Pertaringa vineyard in the foothills of McLaren Vale. Bec studied viticultural science and business, worked in the wine trade in Australia and overseas, and in 2010 returned to South Australia to join her father’s company and manage its portfolio across domestic and international markets. The apprenticeship was thorough, running the commercial side of a substantial wine business before she struck out alone.

She founded Bec Hardy Wines in 2015. Five years later, as part of the family’s long-planned succession, she and her husband Richard Dolan acquired the Pertaringa brand from her father’s business, bringing the vineyard her father had bought in 1980 into her own company. Today the couple own two estate vineyards in Blewitt Springs, a sub-region of McLaren Vale increasingly recognised for the quality and distinctiveness of its fruit, and they continue to work with growers across the area, including family members who farm a vineyard originally planted by Thomas Hardy himself. 

McLaren Vale is a maritime region, its vineyards cooled by the Gulf St Vincent and its long ripening season giving the reds their characteristic depth. The name Pertaringa itself comes from the language of the Kaurna, the region’s traditional owners, and means ‘belonging to the hills’, which is a good a description of the Hardy’s relationship with this land.

Bec Hardy has built is a business that somehow balances the weight of an industry-defining lineage, with the independence of someone who founded her own company and then bought back a piece of the family’s history on her own terms.