History of Pertaringa
In 1981, the Australian wine industry was in bad shape. Classic old vines, used to make fortified and red wines, were being removed and big companies were pulling out of the industry. Twenty-four year old Geoff Hardy had recently graduated from Roseworthy Agricultural College and had seen how the Californians were grafting old vines over to new varieties such as Chardonnay.
Geoff formed a partnership with Ian Leask who was then managing the Ryecroft vineyards and already had a solid background in viticulture. The Ryecroft vineyards came up for sale and the pair could not resist acquiring the best block - this is how Pertaringa, an Aboriginal name meaning ‘belonging to the hills', was born.
Geoff and Ian's grafted vines, Chardonnay in particular, were an instant success. The Shiraz ironically sold to Hardys, Geoff’s family wine company, to make port and only in exchange for some wine as payment. A far cry from today when Pertaringa’s old Shiraz and Cabernet vines make two of the finest full-bodied reds of the region. Much of the fruit is also highly sought after by many of Australia’s leading wine companies for their award winning wines. The Sauvignon Blanc makes a beautiful and classy white and the Semillon, with the benefit of fermentation in new oak, is a real red wine drinker's white. Each individual Pertaringa wine is made from select parcels of the best fruit from each variety grown in the vineyard.
Grape Varieties at Pertaringa
The Pertaringa vineyard was first established in 1969 primarily with Shiraz, arguably McLaren Vale's most expressive grape variety.
After purchasing the vineyard in 1980, Geoff and Ian decided to move with market demand and graft some of the vines to Chardonnay, which became an instant success. They also expanded the existing vineyard by planting Cabernet Sauvignon and Semillon. Since that time, the vineyard has grown to a total of 32 hectares, still primarily planted with Shiraz.
Shiraz 20.1 ha
Cabernet Sauvignon 1.6ha
Muscat a Petits Grains (Frontignac) 0.5 ha
Riesling 3.2 ha
Sauvignon Blanc 1 ha
The white wines are currently sold for the Australian market only and not exported to the UK
The Pertaringa Vineyards
Pertaringa has always been at the forefront of vineyard innovation, from the development and use of machine harvesting and machine pre-pruning in the late 1970s to the early adoption of soil moisture monitoring equipment and biological and biodynamic pest and disease management.
Since 2006, there has been a ‘back to the future’ approach to the vineyard with the introduction of biodynamics and biological farming techniques. A significant amount of vineyard restructuring has taken place with 15ha of Shiraz being carefully re-worked to its original early 1970s shape, and along with careful shoot thinning, leaf removal and irrigation management, this is resulting in some fantastic fruit coming out of the vineyard.
Richard Leask and the vineyard team have also been working towards the vineyard becoming chemical free. This process has been based around the biodynamic principles of Rudolf Steiner’s 1924 lectures on practical, energetic and spiritual approaches to crop fertility and health, and a biological farming program to control fungal disease where machine weeding is used to control undervine weeds.
The program uses specifically blended soil-applied compost preparations to help the vines' nutritional needs, producing a healthy plant that is much less susceptible to fungal and pest attack and much better equipped to show the true terroir of the vineyard site.
