Wine Enthusiast
A perfect score has to be considered in the context of its region. Shafer’s 2004 Hillside Select is tremendous as a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon that competes with its peers at the highest levels. It’s always a fabulous wine, but in warm 2004, Shafer’s amphitheater vineyard sheltered the grapes, ripening them to perfection yet protecting the “iron fist in a velvet glove” structure that André Tchelistcheff defined as Stags Leap. This 100% Cabernet is tremendous in cassis, black currant and mocha flavors, and the 100% new French oak provides perfect additions of smoke and caramel. It’s soft and gorgeous enough to drink now, and should age well in a cool cellar for the next 20 years.
Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate
The 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select performed even better this year than it did in 2007. It possesses an inky/ruby/purple color, a juicy perfume of black currants, black cherries, graphite, charcoal, and toasty oak, superb opulence, a fleshy mid-palate, a multilayered mouthfeel, and a dazzling finish. This flamboyant, sexy Hillside Select can be enjoyed now and over the next 20 years.
Robert Parker, The Wine Advocate
One of the world’s, as well as Napa’s, most profound Cabernet Sauvignons is the 2,000 or so case production of Shafer’s Hillside Select. Made from their finest parcels in Stags Leap, the wine spends nearly 32 months in 100% new oak. This is a wine that usually has 20-30 years of aging potential. The 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select is showing even better than it did last year. A much sexier, opulent, flamboyant style of wine with notes of black currant liqueur intermixed with toasty new oak, charcoal, smoke, barbecue spices, and oodles of fruit, this wine has fabulous richness in an exuberant, sexy style, and a long, heady layered finish with nothing out of balance. The integration of acidity, tannin, wood, and alcohol are brilliant. This is a great wine to drink over the next two decades, if not longer.
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