The Hills region's top wine gong winner is breaking fresh ground.
You can learn a lot about a bloke by taking a good look around his cellar. Geoff Hardy's reflects his appetite for hard work as much as his serious thirst: there, smack in the middle, is a billiard table, with all manner of beauties stacked beneath it.
On top, there's a mattress. That's where Dad sneaks off for a sleep when it's too hot and he's shagged, says daughter Bec, shuffling through her precious collection of birth vintage Bordeaux.
She's just finished her viticulture degree, and she's coolly getting her head around the old man's burgeoning vineyard empire.
Along with a brigade of partners that reads like the wine biz who's who, Hardy has established and manages exemplary vineyards all over the joint. He bought Pertaringa vineyards, established in 1970, 24 years ago. They're next to Drew Noon's, smack on the Willunga Fault, on the piedmont of that dramatic escarpment that leads from Kangarilla to Deadly Dougie's Victory pub at Sellicks. Hardy has 32ha in that suite of mature vines.
In 1993, he bunged in 160ha at Wirrega, near Bordertown. As soon as they were seriously fruiting, he laid down a further 215ha at Angas, near Langhorne Creek. To turn that vast resource into sauce, he helped build another consortium, and established the ubiquitous Barossa Vintners winery at Tanunda, with partners that include Rockfords Robert O'Callaghan, Woodstock's Scott Collett, Reg and Kym Tolley, Stephen and Prue Henschke, the Thomson family of Woolpunda, winebiz finance guru Grant Tilbrook and the Glaetzer family.
But this visit to the cellar was en route to Hardy's favourite possession, the ravishing brocade of vineyards he planted in 1987, at Kuitpo. These are 350m above the gulf, over the scarp from Pertaringa, between Kuitpo Forest and the Willunga watershed. There are 33ha there in the scrub; perfectly satisfied vines manured by fox and kangaroo, watered from the healthy dams Hardy built, and pouring rather well from the posh, newly frocked bottles branded K1 by Geoff Hardy.
No vineyard better highlights the weirdness of the appellation somewhat mysteriously called the Adelaide Hills. To begin, nobody in McLaren Vale has ever called that part of the Southern Mt Lofty Ranges the Adelaide Hills. They appear to have little - climatically, geologically, spiritually, name your category - in common, with say, the Piccadilly Valley. Or the western piedmont of Mt Barker. Or Lenswood, or Paracombe.
This disparity leads to great angst among the Hills grape cockies. All faithful adherents to the gospel Brian Croser (now consultant to Lion Nathan's Petaluma), that the Hills should be home of supreme chardonnay and pinot noir, they reasonably expect such wines to be rewarded by huge gongs at their annual wine show.
But, guess what? Paracombe's gorgeous cabernet franc got up and won in 2002, just as the previous vintage had done the year before. Despite some awkward surgery to the judging team, like removing such unruly wildcats as yours truly from the panel, the chardonnay and pinot brigade still failed to ring the big bell last year. One gold and three trophies later, the cool-climate Adelaide Hills best wine is Geoff Hardy's way cool K1 Kuitpo shiraz.
No surprise, really: the ancient neoproterozoic geology of Kuitpo is a dog's breakfast of lean podsols, harsh quartzite and sandstone, weathered shales and ironstone. You'd expect it to grow the beautiful grass trees, or yakkas, that proliferate there - but grapes? You bet. They love a thrashing.
And you'd be hard-pressed to find a better thrasher. As we tooled around in his big four-wheeler, Hardy dazzled me with his laconic explanations of his experiments with varieties, clones, trellises, rootstocks. While most grape doctors tend to speak of vines like sacred godheads, Hardy talks about chopping trunks off and grafting new varieties like he's changing shoes.
"See those?" he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. We just gave them a new set of roots. What he meant was Rebecca had sawn off some precious, but sadly unpopular, semillon and grafted new viognier cuttings on those old established roots.
Somewhere out there in the bush, Hardy also led me through the new Yakka Paddock vineyard he's doing for film-makers Scott Hicks and his partner Kerry Heysen-Hicks. Varieties? Try tempranillo, dolcetto, durif, tannat and arneis. Oh, yes, and six clones of merlot.
by Philip White