Shafer Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select 2017
Product description
This Cabernet Sauvignon celebrates hillside vineyards. Rugged, arid vineyard blocks 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 from the winery's location within Napa Valley's Stags Leap District. Aged nearly four years before release, this wine offers the pleasures of youthful boldness on release and rich nuance after a decade or more of bottling.
98+ Points - Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Made from 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select displays a deep garnet-purple colour, bursting from the glass with scents of blueberry pie creme de cassis, black cherry compote and chocolate box plus nuances of cedar chest, clove oil, lavender and menthol. The richly fruited, the 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!
98 Points - Jeb Dunnuck
In the running for the wine of the vintage, the 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select is an incredible success. It offers more depth, opulence, and purity than every other wine. Revealing a dense purple colour and 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 an excellent, great finish. Like 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 will take 7-8 years to hit prime time and will be a long-lived bottle of Napa Cabernet. Hats to Doug Shafer and the team for yet another magical Cabernet Sauvignon!
98 Points - James Suckling
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 flavours. Firm, well-integrated tannins. Complex and refined with tremendous energy. One of the finest Hillside Selects I have had.
97 Points - Vinous
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 2017 quite a bit of complexity. Still, the wine's textural finesse and impeccable balance elevate it to its place among the finest wines of the year. Stylistically, 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 bad. 2017 has always been stellar from the 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.
