2013 Shafer Cabernet Sauvignon One Point Five

Community Tasting Notes (131) Avg Score: 92.6 points

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  4/14/2024 - JB12 wrote: 93 Points

  Decanted 2+ hrs. Wine is a classic cab. Deep berry flavors. Very smooth.

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  12/12/2023 - webbaker Likes this wine: 93 Points

  One of the few 2013’s I’ve tasted that are ready to drink. Bright fruit flavors, tannins still present, but not biting your head off. Wish I had more.

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  10/28/2023 - Rick 4 Wine Likes this wine: 95 Points

  I am always ready to dislike shafer and yet this framing wine is in a great spot and delicious! As you’d expect. This is the archetype of SL wine.

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  10/11/2023 - sfwinelover1 Likes this wine: 94 Points

  One off .375 from a large private purchase about 6 years ago (hard to price individual bottles, but about $40). On the nose and palate, fairly vibrant notes of tobacco smokiness, anise, cassis, black currants, black cherries, dark florals, mixed ground spice, oak and gravel. Dark purple with a slight brown tinge, full bodied, thick legs. Robust tannins and medium+ acidity, present and somewhat separate but well balanced, no heat despite 15.4% abv. VG++ persistence and intensity, VG+ complexity. This came out of the bottle ready to go, with classic Shafer deliciousness and very good balance with enough separateness of the elements to keep it interesting. With that being the case, I slow ox’d rather than aerated it over the hour and half before consumption and then during the hour and half I consumed it. I wondered if the fruit was slightly post peak, but it held up well, and the wine continued deepening and integrating, so that the last glass, 3 hours after opening, was incrementally the best, which I wouldn’t have guessed on opening. Great on its own, equally so with chicken burritos. It’s hard to come up definitive advice on drinking window, particularly from drinking it in the .375 format (the last split I had was a ‘06 Araujo Eisele, which was totally gone) other than it’s already very good, even a bit better with air, so while it’s more than fine to drink now, near term variation, particularly in larger format bottles, seems more likely to be up than down. I’ve written elsewhere of my fondness for this producer, and relatively recent price hikes aside, this bottling remains respectable qpr at retail, even more compelling at what I paid, very much a baby HSS, which, even at lower octane, remains a consistently excellent drink when the price differential between the 2 is taken into account. 94+

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  10/7/2023 - CHarder Likes this wine: 92 Points

  For sure improving. Still think it has upside. Gave it a needed 2 decant. But it is a nice napa cab. Full but not over the top. Getting there.

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