Crimson red with a magenta hue in the glass. The nose shows intense, fragrant aromas of ripe black fruits, figs, apricot and wet stone with graphite notes. The palate opens with wet stone, ripe berries, coiled tannins and graphite. As the wine opens and relaxes it shows more black fruits and oak, laced with wet stone. A wine of enormous complexity and longevity.

99 Point Rated - Nick Stock

"Wow. This is a bold, brassy shiraz that carries a wealth of very intense aromas of ripe blackberries, dark plums, licorice and sweetly spiced earth. Still so very youthful and primary. The palate is so powerful, so mouth-filling and so, so juicy. This manages to deliver such intensity and composure. Supple, long and deep-set tannins and heroically expressive fruit. Really impressive now, but this will deliver much more over the next two decades. One of the finest releases to date".

99 Point Rated - Jane Anson

"This is a brilliant wine that makes you sit up and pay attention. Concentrated and mouth watering with spicy liquorice root and black cherries. Needs a couple more years to fully open but already it packs a punch without being overpowering, and it achieves the feat of great wines where you simply know how good they are by how your palate responds to the effortless balance of tannin, juice and brambled fruit. Long ageing potential also. 3.5pH, 70% French oak, 30% American oak. From sandy gravel soils with full sun exposure meaning natural low yields of around 30hl/ha." 

97 Point Rated - Joe Czerwinski Robert Parker's Wine Advocate

"My pick of the recently bottled vintages, the 2016 The Armagh Shiraz shows a bit more obvious oak (simply because of its youth) but also a wonderful taut tension between ripeness and acidity. The fruit here is a bit redder in profile, leaning more toward raspberries than blackberries, while still being fully ripe . Full-bodied and supple, it finishes cedary, intense and long, adding in complex, lingering spice notes."

96 Point Rated - James Halliday Wine Companion

The Barry team extracts the maximum from the vineyard with a deft (14.2% alcohol) touch. It's savoury, earthy, its tannins are four square and ready, charred meat in another channel. It's utterly original, whether or not the family thought they could match Grange. To know the wine you don't have to love it, but you do have to respect it.

95 Point Rated - Gary Walsh The Wine Front

It was a good red vintage in the Clare Valley. The Armagh is one of those wines that is unashamedly old fashioned, perhaps the domain of red-faced men in business suits calling for a bloody big beautiful top end Shiraz, though the quality of tannin, I must say, is pretty impressive.

Lavish levels of toasty spicy oak over blackberry, sage, dried mint and oyster shell savoury stuff, some latent floral perfume waiting to escape. It’s deep and full bodied, intense and purple tasting, thick grainy tannin, almost an ironstone sort of quality to them, fresh acidity, and a long tannic grilled meat and fig finish. It needs, or demands, at least a decade of cellaring.

94 Point Rated - Huon Hooke The Real Review

Deep, dense, dark, glass-staining red/purple colour, youthful and bold. The bouquet is extremely rich, toasty-smoky and complex, with lashings of toasty barrel overtones allied to concentrated fruit. A hint of mint. Some oyster-shell overtones. Chocolate and vanilla. The palate is silky soft and sumptuously flavoured, that tannins lavish but supple and fine-grained.

The authentic and beautifully-concentrated The Armagh Shiraz, is a powerfully-compressed wine that explodes with aroma and flavour. Intense, plush and generous, the oak is hidden behind curtains of deep, ripe, intense fruit and extraordinarily fine, structured tannins. The vineyard is hand-harvested, with several passes, to achieve optimum ripeness and flavour profile. Vinification takes place in two-tonne, open-top fermenters with heading-down boards. Regular rack-and-return and pump-overs take place to optimise extraction of colour and flavour; in some vintages post-ferment maceration may be an option.  Skin contact (post ferment maturation) two to three weeks. Followed by 14 months in 70% French and 30% American Oak.