Best New Winery of the Year

LIVING ROOTS | ADELAIDE HILLS | SOUTH AUSTRALIA

SEBASTIAN and Colleen Hardy are proving you can have the best of both worlds. Under their wine label Living Roots, the husbandand-wife duo make wine in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills, as well as in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Sebastian, or Seb, is a sixth-generation winemaker. His great-greatgreat-grandfather founded Hardy’s in 1853 (his dad is Geoff Hardy), so winemaking is in his blood. “I definitely grew up thinking winemaking was a good path for me, but I didn’t want to have my blinkers on. But after travelling a lot and doing vintages in different places [Australia, France, Italy, Austria, and now upstate New York], I loved the diversity in wine.”

Colleen is a New York native who was working in corporate marketing research and found herself looking for a break from cubicle life.

“I loved wine as a consumer, and knowing that it was a pretty dynamic industry, I decided I wanted to work a harvest, dive right in, and really get my hands dirty.” It was too late to relocate from Chicago to join a harvest in the US, so, rather than wait another year, Colleen turned her attention to the southern hemisphere. After landing in McLaren Vale and working at Hardy’s, she met Seb and fell in love with the wine industry and Australia.

That was back in 2014. Two years later, they released their first wines under Living Roots. Now, the pair work transcontinental harvests, splitting their time between Australia and America. There’s a focus on richer styles of whites in the Finger Lakes, along with sparkling. In the Adelaide Hills, vibrant, medium-bodied reds are the stars.

Seb says having their own business means being able to dabble in all aspects – from viticulture and winemaking to label design and marketing. “It always keeps it interesting, maybe sometimes a little too interesting. There’s a lot of changing gears too many times in a day, but that’s also the really cool part of it.”

After just wrapping up their Aussie vintage at the time of this interview, Seb and Colleen were back in Rochester and gearing up for vintage to start in the Finger Lakes. The duo say the experience of producing wine in different places, with different climates, gives them perspective on winemaking. “Australia is such an amazing part of the world and we didn’t want to give it up, but at the same time I was getting a bit homesick. And so that’s why we thought, well, what if we tried to do both?” says Colleen.

A brand new winery and cellar door is being built in the Finger Lakes, which will showcase wines produced in South Australia and New York. J’aime Cardillo

TOP-RATED WINES TO TRY

Living Roots 2020 Grenache 96 points

$34

Living Roots 2020 Montepulciano

95 points

$34

Living Roots 2018 Pepperberry Shiraz

95 points

$34