BRL Hardy – No Longer the Bridesmaid in Red

About six years ago I received a box of red wine from the then Hardys’ public relations manager, wittily tagged ‘A Case for Hardys Reds’. It was very assumptive, for aside from the Eileen Hardy Shiraz 1988, the case didn’t amount to much at all. How things have changed.

Today BRL Hardy is steeped in excellent red wine. From its very sound, drinkable Nottage Hill upwards it can club together the Leasingham Bin 56 Cabernet Malbec, the Bin 61 Shiraz, the brace of Chateau Reynella Basket Press reds, the Leasingham Classic Clare reds, the Thomas Hardy Cabernet Sauvignon and its flagship stablemate, the Eileen Hardy Shiraz. Not bad going for a company whose best red used to be the sweet, jammy Collection Cabernet Sauvignon of days past.

Nowhere is the transformation better illustrated than at Clare, where Leasingham’s budget Hutt Creek range has justifiably been assigned to the scrapheap, the Bin range revitalised and the Classic Clare wines introduced to become a national flag waver. And like all BRL Hardy reds today, each is priced well below their true worth.

Stellar show results confirm the company’s new-found status within the industry. Consecutive Jimmy Watson successes with the multi-trophy 1994 Leasingham Classic Clare Shiraz and the 1995 Eileen Hardy Shiraz are just the tip of the iceberg.

According to BRL Hardy chief winemaker, Peter Dawson, the improvement is very much a winemaker-driven thing. ‘It’s fortunately coincided with an increased awareness of premium wines, so we could sell a lot more than we presently are doing if we had the volume. We want to increase our volume of premium quality table wine – it’s the most profitable area to be in from the company’s view.

‘Our new approach is a more expensive way to make wine, but we can justify what we’re doing because we’re adding greater value.’
What, exactly, has happened in a mere six years that has seen the BRL Hardy red wine portfolio develop at a rate matched by no other large company?

The MD’s View

‘When Berri Renmano merged with Hardys, we had the crazy situation when it was spending more on oak than Hardys itself’, says BRL Hardy’s managing director, Steve Millar. ‘From day one we recognised that we had to lift our image and that the best profits were in premium bottled wine.

‘We’ve chosen the right people and given them free rein. We found Steve Pannell, Ed Carr the sparkling winemaker, formerly with Seaview and have helped people like Clare winemaker Richard Rowe to emerge. We’ve given them the opportunity to contribute and innovate and backed them by investing between $5-6 million each year on upgrading facilities, about half of which is directly quality-related. Our oak bill has increased from $1.2 million to between $3-4 million each year.

‘We’ve invested around $50 million in vineyard upgrading and development, plus another $10 million in joint ventures. Under Brenton Baker our vineyards are producing the right fruit for the right product.

‘We’re now big enough as a company that if we think we’ve found the right path to travel we’ll put the correct resources behind that direction.’

Better Vineyards make Better Grapes

No doubt about it, the building blocks for wine are grapes, not barrels, so the change at BRL Hardy began in the vineyard. Not so much by planting new vines, but by fine-tuning existing resources, management techniques and by reducing yields. The winemakers are also being more selective than ever before, so the volumes made each year of the Classic Clare reds, the Eileen Hardy Shiraz and the Thomas Hardy Cabernet Sauvignon are determined entirely by the availability of fruit of requisite quality. Peter Dawson says they’re the sorts of wines he wouldn’t compromise.

The vineyards which best illustrate the new Hardy approach are the Schobers vineyard in Clare, source of the Classic Clare reds and the large broadacre development at Padthaway in South Australia’s south-east, nursery for much of the Eileen Hardy shiraz.

Always a dryland vineyard, Schobers was synonymous with stress. While its vines used to struggle under excessive crop loads, today it is pruned much harder to fully ripen a better balance of truly low crops. Its vines have a much better time now that controlled weed levels reduce their competition for scarce moisture, while organic matter is regularly returned to the soil to improve its fertility. Today it’s a healthy, happy vineyard, one of the jewels in the BRL crown.

Like all the other large Australian wine companies, BRL Hardy has extensive broad-acre plantings at Padthaway, which Hardys originally called ‘Keppoch’, a wine region which given its soils, site and climate, has failed to live up to quality expectations. Perhaps now we know why.

All of the major wineries have been guilty of abusing the sub-artesian water resources of Padthaway, once plentiful in volume and excellent in quality. Vineyard managers would spray water around, or even worse – flood the land with it – like a Kuwaiti sheik who has just discovered another oil well in his backyard.

Drip irrigation uses a quarter as much water as overhead irrigation and far less again than flood, so it helps to solve the emerging issues of salinity and rising water table, thereby improving Padthaway’s water quality.

By moving to replace all wasteful forms of irrigation with drip irrigation by 1998, BRL Hardy uses water more wisely and its now mature vines – many of which are nearly thirty years old – produce superior quality at lower cropping levels than ever before.

Furthermore, the traditionally overgrown vine canopies at Padthaway which contributed to ripening problems and actively encouraged botrytis and other vine diseases are today more open and better able to control disease for it.
So dramatic have been the vineyard upgradings at Padthaway that some blocks of shiraz which used to produce cask reds have now become important components of the Eileen Hardy blend. So major have been the improvements in quality that Peter Dawson now expects Padthaway to be considered as an outstanding red wine region and an important national resource for shiraz.

New-Fangled Winemaking the Old-Fashioned Way

Steve Pannell is a young gun Australian winemaker whose status in the industry belies his comparative youth. As manager and winemaker at its Tintara winery, he comes to BRL Hardy via brief, but noteworthy stints with Wirra Wirra and Tim Knappstein Wines, where he was instrumental in setting style parameters for Knappstein’s new premium Lenswood Vineyards brand. His enthusiasm is infectious and he has a brilliant flair in matching traditional winemaking ideas with contemporary wine styles.

‘I’ve only had six or seven years in which I can look at the wines I’ve had a hand in making’, says Pannell. ‘Sometimes I wonder to myself: Hell, I’m only 31 – am I doing the right thing? I’m right out on a limb here!’ BRL Hardy is itself in little doubt.

‘There’s been a whole change in our winemaking philosophy for reds. We’re now adopting small batch winemaking inside a big company and we’re more attentive to detail. Where different soil types cause different ripeness in fruit, we pick them separately and make them that way. The challenge is to make the right choices for each microclimate.’

Although BRL wineries are equipped with all the latest gadgetry, Peter Dawson prefers a traditional approach, using open fermenters for all the best parcels of fruit. It’s a huge job to process around 6,500 tonnes of fruit at Tintara, 2,000 of which are put through open fermenters, are then all hand pressed in the old basket presses, which are then hand-shovelled. You can’t doubt BRL’s degree of commitment.

By keeping batches separate, Dawson says he has a greater chance of following what’s happening in each ferment and controlling it on a small rather than a large basis. Pannell suggests there’s a significant French influence in their approach. ‘We like to gauge the ripeness of our fruit and balance it with what were getting from the skins. We’re not trying to be overly tannic. We make wine by taste, rather than by recipe. We’ll taste a ferment three times a day.’

Time of pressing is determined on taste, since the same grapes might progress in two fermenters at quite different rates, each then requiring different pressing times to ensure their tannin and fruit balances are what Dawson and Co. are looking for. It’s small winemaking on a major scale, each wine created as an individual. All of the premium wines are given in-barrel malolactic fermentation for additional complexity, while oak maturation has received additional attention.

Peter Dawson selects the best oak for the style he’s making and not just oak for oak’s sake. ‘If you have concentration, intensity, sweetness and softness of fruit, you can adopt a more subtle approach to oak, fashioning a more wholesome wine in the process. Ive never had an oak proposal knocked back.

‘The 1995 Eileen Hardy which won the Jimmy Watson Trophy would have to be one of the few wines to win the Watson which wasn’t driven by American oak. The oak we used is very subtle and predominantly French.

‘We’re moving virtually towards 100% French oak for our best reds, looking for the ultimate in complexity. There’s a softness and a fineness you can only really achieve with quality French oak, which supports and integrates better with fruit.’

Dawson’s team are revelling in their challenge for the top of the market, but he doesn’t believe they’re succeeding unless the flow-through of ideas and techniques creates better wines under the cheaper Nottage Hill label as well.
‘We know our wines are better than before, but the brands have had a chequered history. Our marketing people believe we have to buy back our credibility and I hope we’re well on the way to doing that. In the process we’ve offered some exceptional value for money, especially in the Leasingham Bin wines, which tend to sell out within a fortnight of release.’

Steve Pannell is already pondering what’s next. ‘Our next challenge is to improve our styles, but where to? The hardest thing right now is to have patience. We want it to happen faster and faster and faster, but we know we will get there.’ Please login to post comment