Vertical Tasting of Shafer’s Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select

John Shafer, who was then in the publishing business, bought this estate in Stags Leap in 1972 and moved here the following year. Shafer was not “a wine guy,” according to his son Doug Shafer; he had come to check out Napa Valley as an investor and was specifically looking for hillside vineyards. The 230-acre property, located just outside the Silverado Trail, included 30 acres of 60-year-old vines—“a messy field blend,” according to Doug—and Shafer went about replanting everything. He also began planting the hillsides. The Shafers now have 55 acres of vines on the estate plus another 170 in their sites a bit farther to the south (in Stags Leap and Oak Knoll) and in Carneros.

Shafer had to dynamite huge boulders to prepare the steepest upper vineyard for planting, and this south/southwest-facing parcel was quickly named “John’s Folly.” The Hillside Select bottling is a barrel selection from the estate’s hillside vineyards. John’s Folly was the original source for the Hillside Select and, along with the west-facing Sunspot, is still the core of the blend.

John Shafer made the first vintage here in 1978, then constructed a winery in 1980, bottling Chardonnay, Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon that year. After attending UC/Davis, Doug Shafer came to Napa Valley in 1982, working short stints at a couple of wineries before joining his father in 1983, when he made his first vintage. Elias Fernandez began working here in 1984, literally days after he graduated from UC/Davis. After assisting Doug Shafer until 1990 and serving as co-winemaker for the next four years, he became the sole winemaker in 1994, and was also given the responsibility of overseeing the Shafer vineyards, with Doug becoming president.

Shafer's Knoll block, viewed from the front gate 

A Rocky Start, then a Breakthrough

The early vintages of Shafer’s flagship Cabernet (it was not actually labeled Hillside Select until the 1983 vintage) were somewhat pinched wines in the polite, moderately ripe “food style” of the time. Their sensual appeal was further diminished by sterile filtration and obvious acidification. The Shafers had mercaptan problems with their 1984 and 1985 vintages, both of which had to be rebottled prior to release. They brought in consulting enologist Tony Soter during 1987 and 1988, and he coached them on how to harvest by taste rather than strictly by the numbers. Still, it was a few more years before the Shafers made their first seriously good Cabernet. “By 1988 we had a good idea of what we wanted to do,” said Doug Shafer, “but the weather didn’t cooperate that year or the next. We tried doing a bigger extraction but we weren’t getting the big tannins that, say, Howell Mountain provides. I wanted to be like Bo [Barrett at Chateau Montelena] and like Mayacamas, but our tannins are naturally mouthcoating and supple. We were not yet confident in our work.”

Nineteen eighty-nine was the first year that Shafer drastically reduced acidification and stopped sterile-filtering the Hillside Select but Shafer refers to more favorable growing season of 1990 as “the first vintage of the modern era” at the estate. Said winemaker Fernandez: “Today we don't use acid simply to lower the pH but rather to make the wine balanced based on taste regardless of where the pH falls.” Since 1989, he noted, the pHs of the finished wines have normally been in the range of 3.58 to 3.68—on the low side for rich, ripe Napa Cabernets but a bit higher than the earlier vintages.