Pours like quill ink. Dark chocolate, ripe plums, whiff of kirsch, forest berries and lavender, garam masala spice. Slippery, dense and concentrated, midnight dark berries, swish of fine, lacy tannin in a sheath around the lavish licks of dark fruit and exotic spice. So complex, rich and potent. Texture is wonderful, the finish just that bit breathy and warm. The wine is generally epic.

94 points, The Wine Front (May 2021)

Such concentrated blueberry and cherry aromas, as well as violets and fresh-earth aromas. This delivers an immediate sense of richness with chocolate in the mix, too. Very pure. The palate has a very resolved feel with deep, essence-like fruit flavors that hold a rich, plum and blackberry line that drives long and very even. This is really something. Drink over the next decade.

98 points, JamesSuckling.com (February 2022)

Traditionally my favourite wine in the release, not for its immediacy or charm (like the relic) or its elegance and nuance (like the lamella), the Standish brings the savoury brute, it brings the spice, and it brings the staunch. This is the wine in the collection that opens and changes the most as it opens up. It’s got the spicy yin to the fruity yang, wrapped in a fortune cookie of tannin. It’s tannic and dense and honestly pretty unapproachable without enough time to open up so I look forward to seeing it later today. It has a compact spice market located within the confines of the fruit – it’s the usual suspects – star anise, fennel, liquorice root, Szechuan peppercorn, but there’s also fresh grated nutmeg, saltbush, ferrous and red gravel. The wine flexes and contracts and it paces its way across the palate, enduring through the finish, giving us an insight into the folds of flavour and concentration that it will reveal in time. Super impressive, I love it for different reasons to the 18.

97 points, Erin Larkin, erinlarkin.com.au