A Devon emigrant, a riverside block and a first export to England.

Hardys begins with Thomas Hardy, a young man from Gittisham in Devon who reached South Australia aboard the British Empire in August 1850. English Wikipedia, drawing on his obituaries in the Adelaide newspapers The Register and The Advertiser of January 1912, says he first worked for John Reynell at Reynella Farm south of Adelaide, where he learned winemaking from German fellow workers, then spent time on the Victorian goldfields droving cattle to the diggings.

In 1853 he bought a block of about 46 acres on the River Torrens and called it Bankside; the land is now the Adelaide suburb of Underdale, near the present Hardys Road. The same Wikipedia article says he planted shiraz there in 1854, made his first wine in 1857 and in 1859 sent two hogsheads to England, one of the first exports of wine from South Australia. By 1863 the Bankside vineyards held grenache, mataro, muscat, shiraz and other varieties, and Hardy was also buying grapes from neighbours.

The move south came with Tintara. The Tintara winery at McLaren Vale had been built by the doctor and vigneron Alexander Charles Kelly; English Wikipedia, citing a report in the Evening Journal of September 1877, dates Hardy’s purchase to 1877, while the company history in the same encyclopedia says about 1876, citing the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Hardy added a disused flour mill in McLaren Vale, cellars in Currie Street in Adelaide and, in 1893, cellars at Mile End. In 1887 he formed Thomas Hardy and Sons with his three sons and Joseph Rowe Osborn, and around that time it was South Australia’s largest wine producer. The Bankside winery burned down in 1904 and was not rebuilt. The Register called him the “Father of the South Australian Wine Industry” when it marked his passing in January 1912.

The family kept control for most of the next century. English Wikipedia says management passed around 1910 to his son Robert and in 1928 to his grandson Thomas Mayfield Hardy, with Thomas Mayfield Hardy’s cousin Kenneth Hardy becoming chairman from 1938. The company planted vineyards at Padthaway in 1968, bought the London-based Emu Wine Company, owner of Houghton in Western Australia, in 1976, and in 1982 bought Chateau Reynella, where Thomas Hardy had first worked, and made it its headquarters.

From a family firm to one of the largest wine groups in the world.

The ownership story after 1990 is a sequence of mergers. In 1992 Thomas Hardy and Sons merged with the Riverland co-operative group Berri Renmano to form BRL Hardy, which English Wikipedia describes as Australia’s second-largest wine group at the time. In 2003 BRL Hardy and the American drinks company Constellation Brands combined their wine businesses, Constellation Wines Australia’s archived company chronology says, and BRL Hardy was renamed the Hardy Wine Company; English Wikipedia says it took the name Constellation Wines Australia in 2008.

In February 2011 Constellation sold 80 per cent of its Australian and European wine business to CHAMP Private Equity, and the business was renamed Accolade Wines, The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2015. The American investment firm Carlyle Group bought the whole of Accolade in 2018, the Australian Financial Review and InDaily reported. In 2024 control of Accolade passed from Carlyle to Australian Wine Holdco, English Wikipedia says; Pernod Ricard’s announcement describes it as a consortium of institutional investors including funds backed by Bain Capital and Intermediate Capital Group. Accolade announced in July 2024 that it would combine with Pernod Ricard’s international wine business, including Jacob’s Creek, which Pernod Ricard agreed to sell to the same owner; Reuters reported that the sale was completed at the end of April 2025, and the combined company now trades as Vinarchy, headquartered in South Australia.

The look on the shelf has been reworked several times. Food & Drink Business reported in April 2020 that a global Hardys rebrand by the London design agency Denomination was reaching Australian stores, with refreshed labels first appearing on 2019 vintages and the black and gold Hardys logo and crest on every bottle. Julien Marteau, then a marketing manager at Accolade, told the magazine the aim was “a unified, family feel” across the range.

A further overhaul arrived under Vinarchy. Drinks Intel reported on 5 October 2026 that the three core ranges were being redesigned, with Core renamed Crest, VR renamed Voyaging Range and Stamp keeping its name, alongside a campaign called “Almost Unbelievable” due to run from November 2026 in Europe, Asia and Australia. Lucy Bearman, Vinarchy’s global brand director for Hardys, told the publication that consumers had found the brand confusing and that the ambition was to return Hardys to its place as the number one Australian wine brand.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Australian and New Zealand wine names: Wolf Blass, Lindeman’s, Hardys, Banrock Station, Oyster Bay, Cloudy Bay and Kim Crawford. Wine brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A wine brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A founder’s name kept on the label for more than 170 years.

The brand now sits at the centre of a much larger portfolio. In November 2025 the Australian Financial Review reported that Vinarchy’s chief executive, Danny Celoni, planned to cut around 40 per cent of the group’s brands over two years and to put more investment behind three of them: Hardys, Jacob’s Creek and Campo Viejo. Hardys has long been one of the group’s main names in the United Kingdom, where English Wikipedia lists it among the company’s best-known brands alongside Banrock Station.

McLaren Vale remains part of the story, but the winemaking map is changing. The ABC reported in June 2025 that Vinarchy planned to move winemaking for Hardys Tintara in McLaren Vale, along with St Hallett in the Barossa, to its Rowland Flat site by the 2026–27 vintages, while Berri Estates in the Riverland became its main winemaking, packaging and warehousing hub.

The Tintara name still recalls the McLaren Vale winery Hardy bought in the 1870s, and the founder’s own name has been printed on Hardys bottles across all the changes of owner. The name needs a little care online: “The Hardys” is also a professional wrestling tag team, and the English novelist Thomas Hardy is a different man from the winemaker. For the typeface question, see our separate note on the Hardys wine font.

For a design guide, Hardys shows how a founder’s name, a crest and a black-and-gold scheme can carry a wine brand through more than 170 years and several owners, with each redesign reorganising the ranges rather than replacing the name. Compare Penfolds, the South Australian winery behind Grange, and Jacob’s Creek, its sister brand under Vinarchy. For this guide we use label black, crest gold and shiraz red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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