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Reviews taken from article published in the Daily Examiner – 27th December 2020. Ox Hardy McLaren Vale Grenache 2020, $38. Among the snappiest labels in the business, someone with an extremely advanced sense of colour and restraint has excelled. So too the winemaker. Sophisticated and cleverly hiding 14.5 percent behind a light, bright facade. 9.4/10. Ox…

Over the last year, Hardy has released a serious of eponymous wines from the vineyard that attest to its reputation as the grandest of the Vale’s crus, but this latest release in the most intriguing.

In a quiet corner of McLaren Vale Ox Hardy’s returning life to a sacred wine site. I doubt Andrew ‘Ox’ Hardy wakes in the morning and has a panic about what he’s going to wear to the office.I haven’t seen inside his wardrobe, but I suspect there’s a decent selection of variously toned pink shirts, lurid to pale. He’s famous for them. Not quite as famous as Chester Osborn is for his outrageous shirts, but he’s getting there.

After 20-year-old Englishman Thomas Hardy arrived in Port Adelaide on August 12, 1850, he quickly proved he was no ordinary man. He first worked for 12 months on the vineyards of John Reynell, then on a cattle station at Normanville, before moving to Victoria’s goldfields where he became a butcher, having driven the cattle he bought from the station at which he had worked.

It’s a bright fresh autumn day and Andrew Hardy is striding through his family’s vineyard at Upper Tintara, in a secluded corner of McLaren Vale. His great-great-grandfather, South Australian wine legend Thomas Hardy, bought this place from its founder, Dr Alexander Kelly, another important wine pioneer, in the 1870s.

One of the legendary stories of Australian wine history has just been reborn. I suspect this country has not seen a new release of such pedigree, such depth of history and such sheer and effortless magnificence since the very launch of Hill of Grace itself in 1958.

The little hamlet of Upper Tintara sits largely hidden from view in a small valley directly north of the town of McLaren Vale in South Australia. To the initiated, this little patch of dirt, which backs onto the Onkaparinga National Park, is hallowed ground.