Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon 2002
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
One of the world’s greatest wines year in and year out is Shafer’s Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select. The 2002 was a candidate for perfection the first time I tasted it. The estate keeps this cuvee 32 months in 100% new French oak, so I had a number of chances to see it from barrel. Moreover, I purchased the wine for my own cellar and have had it at least a half dozen times since bottling, and it just gets more profound with each sip. This wine is beyond belief for how it balances its extraordinary richness, purity of personality, and the elegance and finesse of the Stags Leap District with massive cassis fruit, spring flowers, toasty oak and earth. The wine is fabulously concentrated, multidimensional and built like a skyscraper, yet nothing is out of place. The wood, alcohol, acidity and tannin are all in perfect balance. This offering is a tribute to the greatness of Napa Valley, which was recognized by men and women hundreds of years ago, and to the modern day genius of the Shafer family. This 2002 has 50 years of life ahead of it - but why wait!
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Wine Spectator
Very young, rich and extracted, this boasts a dense, powerful presence and tannic core flavors of blackberry, black licorice, cedar, mocha, roasted coffee, loamy earth, vanilla and dried herb. A tour de force of flavor, ending with ripe, muscular tannins.
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Wine Enthusiast
The impression is of a young, tannicly closed but enormously promising Cabernet. Floods the mouth with dramatic black currant, cherry and chocolate flavors, masses of toasty, caramelized new oak, and a rich, minerally earthiness. For all the power, there’s elegance and refinement.
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Wine & Spirits
The vines that produced John Shafer's first cabernet in 1978 now form the core of Hillside Select, from the small knolls surrounding the winery. They grow in a sweet spot of the Stags Leap District, farmed since the mid-eighties by Doug Shafer and winemaker Elias Fernandez; since 1991, they have consistently produced one of the top wines of the Napa Valley. Those vines yielded an intensely structured 2002, posh with supple cabernet fruit and dark minerality in the tannins. It feels sleek even as the delicious berry flavors burst out of the tannins and last.
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Connoisseurs' Guide
In what has proven to be a sometimes difficult year, Shafer shines once again with this spectacular, immensely extracted Cabernet . Underpinned by a wealth of concentrated cassis-like fruit, shot through with rich, loamy spice and awash in altogether extravagant oak, it is a wine that does not speak in hushed tones but comes with plenty of drama. For all of its very considerable weight and undisguised power, it still shows a fine sense of overall balance, and the evident tannins and heat that emerge in its very long finish are beautifully buffered by its deep and wholly compelling fruit.
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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.