Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon 2017

  • 98 Jeb
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  • 98 Robert
    Parker
  • 98 James
    Suckling
  • 97 International
    Wine Cellar
  • 95 Wine
    Enthusiast
  • 94 Wine
    Spectator
4.7 Fantastic (13)
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Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon 2017  Front Bottle Shot
Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon 2017  Front Bottle Shot Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon 2017  Front Label

Product Details


Varietal

Region

Producer

Vintage
2017

Size
750ML

ABV
15.5%

Features
Collectible

Your Rating

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Somm Note

Winemaker Notes

This Cabernet Sauvignon celebrates hillside vineyards. Rugged, arid vineyard blocks., such as these, with rocky, scant soils create ideal conditions for producing wine of classic richness and elegance. This wine also exhibits the structure and beauty that are the hallmarks of wines born of the winery's location within Napa Valley's Stags Leap District. Aged nearly four years prior to release, this wine offers the pleasures of youthful boldness on release and rich nuance after a decade or more of bottling.

Professional Ratings

  • 98
    In the running for the wine of the vintage, the 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select is an incredible success and offers more depth, opulence, and purity than just about every other wine out there. Revealing a dense purple color as well as a killer nose of blueberries, chocolate-covered cherries, scorched earth, tobacco, violets, and exotic spices, it hits the palate with full-bodied richness, a seamless, pure, incredibly layered mouthfeel, building tannins, and a great, great finish. As with most top 2017s, it stays tight and compact on the palate, with notable structure and impressive concentration. It has some up-front appeal given its purity of fruit and balance, yet it's going to take 7-8 years to hit prime time and will be a long-lived bottle of Napa Cabernet. Hats off to Doug Shafer and the team for yet another magical Cabernet Sauvignon!
  • 98
    Made from 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select displays a deep garnet-purple color, bursting from the glass with scents of blueberry pie, crème de cassis, black cherry compote and chocolate box plus nuances of cedar chest, clove oil, lavender and menthol. The richly fruited, full-bodied palate has a lively skip in its step, featuring gorgeous ripe, velvety tannins and fantastic freshness to support all the spicy black fruit layers, finishing long and perfumed. An absolute triumph! Rating: 98+
  • 98
    Wild blackberries and brambleberries on the nose with raw cocoa, cloves and crushed gravel. Violets and orange peel, too. It’s medium-bodied with wonderful purity and depth of fruit, interlaced with dark-chocolate flavors. Firm, well-integrated tannins. Complex and refined with fantastic energy. One of the finest Hillside Selects I have had. Better from 2024.
  • 97
    The 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select is an insanely beautiful wine. The aromatics alone are pure seduction. Juicy, red berry fruit, crushed flower, cinnamon, blood orange and spice give the 2017 quite a bit of complexity, but it is the wine's textural finesse and impeccable balance that elevate it to its place among the very finest wines of the year. Stylistically, the 2017 is a bit more red-toned in profile. Texturally, it is a bit lighter and less opulent than the norm, but that is not a bad thing. The 2017 has always been stellar from barrel, but the from-bottle tasting is the proof in the pudding. It's a tour de force from Proprietor Doug Shafer and Winemaker Elias Fernandez.
  • 95

    This is the 35th vintage of this 100% varietal powerhouse, a deeply concentrated, muscular and intensely flavored wine that offers equal parts grace and age ability. Blue fruit and notes of iron, crushed rock and cocoa powder deliver a seamless palate of opulence, with lasting hints of allspice, black pepper and oak. Best After 2027. Cellar Selection.

  • 94

    This drips with rich blackberry, boysenberry and raspberry fruit flavors and is liberally laced with licorice root and singed alder notes, delivering a nice tarry tug through the finish as the fruit drips. Shows a twinge of the vintage's rusticity in its tannins, but it's a heck of an effort in this tricky year. Best from 2023

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Shafer

Shafer Vineyards

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Shafer Vineyards, California
Shafer Vineyards  Winery Video

Shafer Vineyards has produced classic Napa Valley wines for more than 40 years.  

Shafer’s wines, including its signature Cabernet Sauvignon, Hillside Select, are found in collectors’ cellars and on wine lists in top luxury hotels and restaurants throughout the world. 

The vineyard and cellar teams, led by winemaker Elias Fernandez, cultivate more than 200 acres of Shafer-owned vineyards, sources for the winery's celebrated Red Shoulder Ranch Chardonnay, TD-9, One Point Five, Relentless, and Hillside Select. 

The winery has a decades-long commitment to sustainability. Beginning in the 1980s Shafer embraced farming techniques that eliminate insecticides and herbicides, and carefully conserve water resources. In 2004 Shafer became the first winery in the U.S. to go 100% solar. 

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A noble variety bestowed with both power and concentration, Cabernet Sauvignon enjoys success all over the globe, its best examples showing potential to age beautifully for decades. Cabernet Sauvignon flourishes in Bordeaux's Medoc where it is often blended with Merlot and smaller amounts of some combination of Cabernet Franc, Malbecand Petit Verdot. In the Napa Valley, ‘Cab’ is responsible for some of the world’s most prestigious, age-worthy and sought-after “cult” wines. Somm Secret—DNA profiling in 1997 revealed that Cabernet Sauvignon was born from a spontaneous crossing of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc in 17th century southwest France.

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Stags Leap Wine

Napa Valley, California

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Legend has it that quick and nimble stags would escape the indigenous hunters of southern Napa Valley through the landmark palisades that sit just northeast of the current city of Napa. As a result, the area was given the name, Stags Leap. While its grape-growing history dates back to the mid-1800s, winemaking didn’t really take off until the mid-1970s after a small but pivotal blind tasting called the Judgement of Paris.

When a 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon won first place against its high-profile Bordeaux contenders, like Chateau Mouton Rothschild and Chateau Haut-Brion, international attention to the Stags Leap District of Napa Valley escalated rapidly.

The vineyards in this one-of-a-kind wine growing region receive hot afternoon air reflecting off of its eastern palisade formation. In combination with the cool evening breezes from the San Pablo Bay just south, this becomes an optimal environment for grape growing. While many varieties could thrive here, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot dominate with virtually no others, save for a spot or two of Syrah.

Stags Leap soils—eroded volcanic and old river sediments—encourage well established root systems and result in complex, terroir-driven wines. Stags Leap District reds have a distinct sour cherry and black berry character with baking spice and dried earth aromas, and supple tannins.

SFR781597_2017 Item# 781597

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