Charlotte Hardy
FOR THE THRILL OF IT
Acclaimed winemaker Charlotte Hardy describes her wines by their personalities, names bottles after loved ones and is always experimenting. She’s deadly serious about the joy of making wine.
From her new home on South Australia’s beautiful Fleurieu Peninsula, Charlotte crafts expressive wines grown in the crisp, cool vineyards of the Adelaide Hills. These are elegant wines that win awards, but that ultimately were made to be enjoyed – wines that are “approachable, easy to drink, and don’t leave people feeling confused or intimidated” as Charlotte says.
A life in wine
The joy Charlotte has for wine is evident in everything she does, all the way through to her whimsical bottle labels featuring illustrations of rainbows and elephants.
The New Zealand-born winemaker launched her wine label – Charlotte Dalton Wines (Dalton is her middle name) – in the Adelaide Hills’ Basket Range in 2015, after getting her start in New Zealand and working in Bordeaux, France and the US’s Napa Valley. Just three years later, her Pinot Noir was named the most drinkable wine in South Australia at the 2018 Hot 100 Wines awards.
For a time, Charlotte successfully ran a mobile wine laboratory that provided chemical analysis services to winemakers in the Adelaide Hills. So she’s got the technical knowledge to back up her craft, but for Charlotte it’s all about the pleasure of making wine.
“My philosophy is ‘fun, friends and merriment’,” she says. “I just want it to be fun for me. I never ever want it to be something that stresses me out.
“Winemaking started as my career and now it’s my everything – it’s my hobby, it’s my lifestyle, it’s my family.”
Living and breathing wine comes easily living with her husband, Ben Cooke, who is also a winemaker (at Cooke Brothers Wines). Recently the couple and their two young children moved down to the Fleurieu Peninsula, where they’re building a winery and cellar door. Charlotte may have a new home for now, but her wines – which range from citrusy Semillon to elegant Shiraz – still hail from the hills, where she has sourced her grapes for many years.
“Walking into their vineyards, you feel [the growers’] love and everything that they’ve put into it. And then I think that translates through my product,” she says.
“I have the utmost respect for the people that grow the grapes and the people that drink the wine. And I’m just the middleman that guides the grapes into the bottle for those people to enjoy.”
“Winemaking started as my career and now it’s my everything – it’s my hobby, it’s my lifestyle, it’s my family.” – Charlotte Hardy
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