The 2021 vintage expresses Hillside Select’s singular elegance, vibrancy, and balance. The aromas lift out of the glass, offering blackberry, cedar, black currant, and just-picked black cherry with graceful floral and leather tones. The complexity of the vintage is striking, merging dark fruit with tobacco, red plum, wet stone, lavender, and black tea. The ripe, seamlessly integrated tannins add depth, precision, and serious structure for decades of aging, all culminating in a long, exquisite finish.

Aged 32 months in 100% new French oak. It is quintessentially Stags Leap, with grapes grown on Shafer's famous Hillside estate vineyard, roughly 25ha, with very shallow volcanic tufa soils. It's a barrel selection of the very best blocks. A total of 2,900 cases were produced. Such a beautifully balanced wine with tremendous staying power and expressive Stags Leap ironstone minerality with heady sagebrush and conifer notes with white pepper and walnut husk. The wine has an impressive depth of red-toned fruit on the mid-palate framed by tannins that practically dance across the palate, exuding length, tension, and power. Huckleberry and black cherry fruits, black truffle, dried violets, graphite, and salted dark chocolate are all framed by racy acidity, which keeps everything fresh and lifted. The 2021 releases mark Elias Fernandez's 38th vintage as Shafer's winemaker. He was hired by John Shafer in 1984, two weeks out of UC Davis. - 99pts Decanter

The 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select is insanely beautiful. It's also one of the very finest wines I have ever tasted here. Bright, pliant and resonant, the 2021 offers a beguiling mix of Cabernet Sauvignon aromatics, generous fruit and gentle structure. The stylistic shift at Shafer has been remarkable—the 2021 is a great example. Red-toned fruit, blood orange, menthol, pine and sweet spice build into the eternal finish. - 99pts Vinous

All Cabernet Sauvignon from specific hillside blocks on the estate, Shafer's 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon Hillside Select spent 28 months in 100% new French oak. It's a big, ripe wine, weighing in at 15.5% alcohol, but it remains harmonious from front to back. Deep, intense aromas of black cherries and cassis are accented by dried spices on the nose, while the full-bodied palate is rich and textural, showing tremendous intensity and length on the finish. - 99pts Wine Advocate