Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate
I should not be surprised that the 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select merited a perfect rating since I rated it 99 eight years ago. I also gave the 2002 Hillside Select a perfect rating. Kudos to Doug and John Shafer for creating two perfect wines in back to back vintages. The 2001 is a big wine (14.9% natural alcohol), but the alcohol is buried beneath an avalanche of creme de cassis, wood smoke, toast, licorice and spring flower characteristics. Super full-bodied with fabulous fruit purity, a broad, expansive mouthfeel, lots of glycerin and a huge upside, this 2001 is still an infant at age ten, but it is approachable as well as compelling to smell and taste. It has at least another three decades of aging potential ahead of it and is one of the great young, legendary classics from Napa Valley. It was a privilege to taste. There are approximately 2,000 cases of this cuvee which comes from Shafer’s hillside vineyards in the Stags Leap area and is aged 32 months in 100% new French oak.
Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate
The 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select is a potentially perfect wine in the making. A skyscraper that builds in the mouth with multiple dimensions, amazing layers of flavor, great delicacy, and tremendous purity, this inky purple-colored Cabernet offers extraordinarily pure creme de cassis notes intermixed with crushed rocks, flowers, sweet oak, an amazingly powerful yet impeccably balanced mid-palate, and a sweet, 70-second finish. This prodigious Cabernet Sauvignon is about as good as Cabernet can be.
Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate
Shafers flagship wine is the 2,000 case cuvee of Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon. Aged 32 months in 100% new French oak prior to bottling, it is one of the worlds greatest Cabernet Sauvignons. Like many of the top wines of the vintage, the 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select has closed down, but it reveals impressive potential. Its dense purple color is accompanied by an exquisite bouquet of charcoal, sweet oak, black currant liqueur, and graphite. Full-bodied and powerful, with superb intensity, length, persistence, purity, and texture, it should either be decanted for several hours in advance, or given another 2-4 years of bottle age. Drink it over the following 20-25 years. Shafer Vineyards, one of the most impeccably run wineries in the world, is a wonderful family operation that deserves all the success they have earned.
Wine Enthusiast
No Cabernet smells better. This is an enormously attractive, well-oaked wine constituted from the best possible fruit. In the mouth, it immediately seduces. Shafer knows it has to rise to expectations with this wine, and the 2001 does not disappoint. The fruit is spectacular, all cassis. The oak is rich, flamboyant and delicious. Structurally, the wine has the best tannin-acid structure Napa is capable of. Immediately delicious now, this wine should develop over the next 10 years.
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