The Standish Wine Company

The Barossa has never had trouble making big wine. What Dan Standish has spent the last quarter-century proving is that it can make precise wine too: single-vineyard Shiraz that shows where it was grown rather than how much the winemaker could extract.

A Barossan, and an outsider's ambition

Standish is a sixth-generation Barossan. He founded The Standish Wine Company in 1999 while working at Torbreck, and has kept it deliberately small — in the region of 800 dozen a year, sold largely to people who already know what they are looking for. His own description of the challenge is telling: big Barossa Shiraz is easy, elegance and delicacy are much harder.

One vineyard per wine

The range is built around single sites, each bottled on its own so the differences between them are the point. The Standish comes from the family's vineyard at Greenock in the north-west of the valley and is pure Shiraz. The Relic comes from a vineyard at Krondorf planted in 1912, with a small proportion of Viognier alongside the Shiraz. Other wines — The Schubert Theorem from Marananga, Andelmonde, and Lamella from the Eden Valley — extend the same idea across the region's different soils and elevations.

How they are made

The approach is traditional in the best sense. The Standish has been made with around half whole bunches, new oak is kept in check, and barrels that don't meet the standard for the single-vineyard wines are sold off rather than blended in. The aim, as Halliday's notes put it, is fruit purity and transparency of site: wines with the weight and depth the Barossa is known for, but with line, freshness and detail as well.

At Winetrust

We hold The Standish 2022. It is a wine built for the cellar — approachable with a long decant now, but with its best years well ahead of it.