2018 Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon
Market price
Buying options
Tasting notes
The 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select is another perfect wine, although readers will need to have patience, as it’s still a baby. Deep purple-hued with a perfumed, vibrant bouquet of blue fruits, graphite, spring flowers, and lead pencil, it’s full-bodied, sensationally concentrated, has perfectly integrated acidity, tannin, and alcohol, not a hard edge to be found, and an incredible finish. This monumental Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is 7-8 years away from maturity and will have 40-50 years of overall longevity.
Critic scores
Average Score
Jancis Robinson MW
Jancis Robinson MW
More reviews and scores
100% Cabernet Sauvignon. Very deep purplish crimson. Some herbs as well as the sweetness and alcohol for which this bottling is famous. Not a wine designed for British palates, but it's well done in its own style. There's some structure here… (JR)
Hillside Select is produced each vintage from carefully selected blocks – including Sunspot, John’s Upper Seven, Venado Ilegal and Firebreak – of the hillside vineyards surrounding the winery, designed to express the voluptuous fruit, rich flavours and velvety texture that characterise Stags Leap District grapes. Aged 32 months in 100% new 60-gallon French oak barrels. Massive, deep impenetrable colour. Lovely intensity on the nose, of youthful, briary and bitter black-cherry/damson fruit. Generous, plush palate with great length, fine tannins and plenty of oak yet to be fully soaked up by the concentrated fruit. Still youthful, this has masses of potential. (AWH)
Just as it was from barrel, the 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select is stunning. Bright acids give the 2018 tons of energy. This is an especially mid-weight, refined Hillside Select that is all class. Dark blue/purplish fruit, lavender, spice, mint and blood orange build in the glass. Elegant and bright, the 2018 shows all the energy of the year in spades.
About the producer
The site of Shafer has been around since 1880, and grapes continued to be grown here, even during prohibition. It is said that some wine was made here during that time. In 1972, John Shafer bought the property in the Stag’s Leap district, he immediately began planting the Cabernet on the hillside.