The story of the McLaren Vale Hotel is more complicated than most people realise. In fact, for much of its life it was not known as the McLaren Vale Hotel at all. Older residents and local history records remember it as the Bellevue Hotel, while in its earliest days it traded as the Clifton Hotel. The changing names reflect the evolution of McLaren Vale itself, from scattered colonial villages into the wine region known today.
The building first appeared in 1857 when local landowner Richard Bell constructed the Clifton Hotel within the township of Bellevue. Bell had established Bellevue as a small settlement north of Gloucester, naming the hotel in honour of his wife’s maiden name, Clift. Early licensees included Alfred Bock, followed by John Clift and Nicholas Clift. At the time, the district was still developing around wheat farming, flour milling and transport routes to the south coast.
Like much of the district, the hotel struggled during the economic downturn and population decline of the late nineteenth century. By the 1860s the licence had lapsed and the building fell into disuse. For years it sat disused beside the growing vineyards and the nearby Tintara winery precinct.
Its revival came through one of the defining figures of Australian wine history, Thomas Hardy. After purchasing Tintara in the early 1880s, Hardy also acquired the old Clifton Hotel. He expanded the structure with additional wings, transformed it into a “wine and refreshment shop,” and renamed it the Bellevue Hotel. The name suited both the township and the elevated outlook across the district. Hardy reportedly used the hotel as his headquarters when visiting McLaren Vale from Adelaide.
During the early twentieth century the Bellevue Hotel became one of the social centres of the district. A succession of publicans managed the hotel, including Mrs W. F. Delany, John H. Carter, James Edgar Howe and Laurence Frederick Nielsen. The hotel stood at the heart of a changing townscape as the settlements of Bellevue and Gloucester gradually merged together.
By 1923 the combined township was officially gazetted as McLaren Vale. Yet the hotel retained the Bellevue name for another sixteen years. It was only in 1939 that the building formally adopted the name Hotel McLaren, aligning itself with the identity of the now unified town.
Today, traces of those earlier identities remain scattered through the site. The Bellevue name survives in the dining and bar spaces of the modern hotel, a nod to the building’s long connection with the old Bellevue township. Beneath the renovations and hospitality fit-outs sits one of the oldest continuously operating public buildings in McLaren Vale — a structure that quietly links the district’s wheat, wine and settlement history together.
