2016 Shafer Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select

Community Tasting Notes (25) Avg Score: 96.0 points

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  2/17/2024 - BottleScholar Likes this wine: 95 Points

  Fantastic! Dark concentrated ripe red and black fruit with just a bit of complexing earthiness. Beautifully balanced. A great example of the ripeness and concentration offered by Stags Leap District with the restraint of a talented winemaker. Significantly benefitted from an hour in the decanter.

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  9/14/2023 - AGELVIS Likes this wine: 97 Points

  One hour decant. Very deep dark magenta color. Plum, rum cake, thyme, and browned butter. Super smooth, dry palate. Full, round tannins on the longish finish.
  
  Third wine of the night at our good friends’ country club. Paired with terrific bone-in ribeye. My ability to take meticulous notes was fading at this point.

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  6/6/2023 - csimm wrote: 96 Points

  TOP SHELF WINE WEEKEND: Tannic and drying, the chest on this thing is bumping and thumping with push, thrust, grip and clutch, but the fruit has a difficult time elbowing past the bro-code bullishness of the frame. Black fruited, mostly of the unripe and crunchy kind, with black rock adding to the impression of angularity and coarseness. Finishes dry and… dry…
  
  That was day one. There was a hair of this left over for day two, which was a night-and-day experience. The fruit had finally managed to shove past the skeletal armor and offer exciting mineral-laced blackberry, blueberry skin, and black raspberry flavors. The energy here is exciting. Still, like running your palate along a cobblestone road at a farmer’s market, the 2016 HSS is gonna need another decade at least to figure out how to fan out the goods. This is a long-hauler for sure.

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  5/28/2023 - I'd Rather Be Drinking Wine Likes this wine: 94 Points

  Wild and Crazy Memorial Weekend - Sunday (Chris' Castle aka Melissa's Manor): Another baby, but fun to taste! Yes, this has all the stuffing to be great, and I would expect nothing less. More fruit forward and pretty darn tannic (probably the most tannic wine of the night, or at least the most noticeable tannins) This wine is very good from an academic standpoint, and pretty darn good from a tasting standpoint, but only showing vague glimpses of what is to come (based on other tastings of older Hillsides). I know there was a change in ownership, but I still expect similar performance to past vintages, and seeing how 16 was a pretty stellar vintage for Napa, I fully expect this to take its place amongst the best Shafer HSS!
  
  2016 Shafer HSS - Mostly red fruit with hints of darker fruit looming in the background. Already showing hints of cocoa, earth and lots of toasted oak. This wine is good now, and fairly complex, but it should be a blockbuster in coming years. More closed down (IMO) than most 2016s. 94 now, but should flirt with perfection in the future.

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  5/28/2023 - bsumoba Likes this wine: 96 Points

  Memorial Madness at Case de Chris y Melissa - Day 2 of 2: I actually liked this wine today. For this wine, maybe a tad young actually and I might have liked this a bit more with a few more years on it. Nevertheless, this wine is extremely well made and built to last. I have a bit of nostalgia when I hear Hillside Select. It was one of the few wines I looked up to in the sense that the early 2000s of HSS along with Araujo Eisele, Insignia and Les Pavots were the sort of benchmark wines for me at the time. I’m glad they are still producing good wine despite having been sold to a larger entity.

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