John Shafer, Doug Shafer

Dear Shafer Friend:

or three years 2005 Hillside Select® has matured in French oak barrels and then rested another year in the bottle. At last we’re pleased to announce the imminent release of our signature wine from this outstanding vintage.

This is a Hillside Select brimming with youthful, dark, juicy qualities all of which will quiet down and evolve beautifully with time in your cellar.

The official release date for this wine is September 1, 2009, however, as a Hillside Select mail list customer we’re offering this early opportunity to reserve your allocation.

Ordering Your WineThe best way to secure your wine is to use our online store at www.ShaferVineyards.com. For those who do not have Internet access, we are able to take your order by telephone.

Remember that to remain on the Hillside Select list, we ask that you purchase at least one bottle of this release by August 1, 2009. In order to protect the wine from potential heat damage, we will ship your order during the cooler weeks of November 2009.

With Appreciat ion Before closing we want to acknowledge something important – in the world outside the quiet of our vineyard and cellar it’s been a tumultuous year. Many of our friends both in the wine and in the restaurant business have faced historic challenges. Through all of this we have been deeply honored by the continued strong support of Hillside Select customers like yourself.

On behalf of everyone at Shafer, we want to thank you.

Warm regards,

John & Doug Shafer

FJuly 2009

a cooler-than-typical summer, which allowed us

to leave the fruit on the vine until it achieved true

physiological ripeness.

Experienced TeamThe other element that played a major role in wine

quality comes down to logistics in the cellar. Even

with a great deal of fruit thinning, we still saw

tonnage up 20 to 30 percent. Fortunately we had

the experience of 1997 under our belts and were

able to successfully manage the circus of getting

vineyard crews in place at the right times, running

an efficient crush pad and playing the game of

find-a-tank.

The good news about the size of the vintage

was that it allowed us to select only the top tier of

the wines we made and to sell more than usual to

the bulk wine market.

Winemaker’s Notes“This Hillside Select is dark and voluptuous with rich density,

balancing elegant, extracted fruit and youthful power. These

are the signature aromas and flavors of our hillside vineyards

– loads of blackberry, black cherry, cassis, dark chocolate, and

black spice integrated seamlessly with vanilla and oak, all drawn

together by silky-textured, ripe tannins. This is a vintage that

I’d compare to 1994 and 1997.”

— Elias Fernandez, Shafer winemaker

“… displays a Bordeaux-like personality … black purple color, stunningly sweet fruit, and a gorgeous bouquet of underbrush, forest floor, crème de cassis, lead pencil shavings, and toasty barrique are found in this ripe, full-bodied, deep, stunningly well-balanced, substantial wine with undeniable complexity as well as richness.” — Robert M. Parker, Jr., The Wine Advocate

Hillside Select Tastings NotesBased on recent tastings from 750ml bottles with Doug Shafer and Elias Fernandez. A complete list is on our website: http://www.shafervineyards.com/wines/hillside.php.

2005 From a year of abundant fruit we selected only the best-of-the-best from our small vineyard blocks. Pure varietal aromas of blackberry and cassis almost seem to press the cork out of the bottle followed by juicy flavors of black cherry, currant, cassis liqueur, black plum, dark chocolate, spice and tobacco. The exuberance of these flavors comes in a knitting of ripe, round tannins that promises, as we’ve seen with this wine, that the power of youth will one day mature into the smoky elegance and complexity of age. Drink now – 20 years

2004 This is a classic Hillside Select striking a balance of dark, lush, jammy fruit with youthful elegance. These are the enduring aromas and flavors of our hillside grapes – loads of blackberry, cassis, dark chocolate, juicy black cherry, black pepper integrated nicely with oak, char and vanilla all tied up in a bow of silky, firm, easy-to-enjoy tannins. In terms of its weight and style, this one is a close relative of the 1999 vintage. Drink now – 19 years

2003 The aromas of blackberry, black cherry and spice combine power and perfume while the wine fills the mouth with a rich abundance of cassis, blackberry, toasty vanilla, mo-cha, herbs, and a seamless integration of soft, ripe Stags Leap District tannins. Expansive and juicy in the mouth with flavors that remain long after the glass is empty. Drink now – 14 years

Continued on last page

A b u n d a n c e a n d E l e g a n c e

The 2005 vinTage produced exquisiTe fruiT To spare

he 2005 Hillside Select emerges from a vin-

tage that started with ample spring rain. Then

as if on cue, the weather cleared at the right

moment for a good, solid fruit set on our

hillside vineyards. Set is a critical phase in which

the vine’s tiny flowers become small green berries.

When set is good, it bodes well for the vintage,

since it means you’re more likely to harvest fruit

that’s uniformly hitting peak ripeness.

“The weather that summer reminded me of

the 1970s here in the valley. When I was in high

school I remember we’d have fog and overcast until

noon. Then we’d have clearing with heat and great

sunlight all afternoon,” says Doug Shafer.

Delicious Harvest In Stags Leap District our vines were heavy

with beautiful, inky colored Cabernet Sauvignon.

Overall the fruit reminded us of what we saw

in 1997, which was an unusual year in that crop

loads were fairly high and, thanks to extended cool

weather and hang time, we harvested fruit with

voluptuous, mouth-filling flavor.

Unlike 1997, early on in 2005 we knew we

were headed for a big crop. After fruit set we were

seeing a tremendous number of clusters crowded

with berries.

The growing season was the saving grace for

a crop of this size. It was a longer-than-usual and T

Vineyard Location: 100% Shafer’s Hillside Estate Vineyard in Stags Leap District including vineyard blocks such as Sunspot, John’s Folly, Upper Seven, Hitching Post, and Venado Ilegal

Varietal Composition: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon

Brix at Harvest: 24.0° - 25.5°

Alcohol: 14.9%

Cooperage: 32 months in 100% new 60 gallon French oak barrels (Allier & Tronçais)

Suggested California Retail: $215

2 0 0 5 H i l l s i d e S e l e c t ® C a b e r n e t S a u v i g n o n

To D e c a n t o r N o t t o D e c a n tBy elias fernandez, shafer Winemaker

ou’re at a restaurant and order a special,

older red wine with dinner. The sommelier

presents the bottle and asks, “Would you

like me to decant this for you?”

It may sound like a mandatory “yes” but

it’s not. To know the right answer for you, it’s best

to know what decanting does and

doesn’t do.

First, many wine lovers use

the term decanting interchange-

ably with aeration, which actually

means bringing the wine into

contact with oxygen. Some people

like to pour a young, tannic red

wine out of the bottle and into a

separate vessel exposing it to a lot

of oxygen, essentially speeding up

the aging process.

Extreme AerationAs a way to demonstrate aeration for a friend, I

recently opened a bottle of a 2006 Cabernet Sau-

vignon and poured a taste into one set of glasses.

Then I emptied half the bottle into a blender and

turned it on – simply a form of extreme aeration

(and kind of fun).

I poured a taste of the “blenderized” Cabernet

into a separate set of glassware and we tried both.

We agreed that the wine poured directly from

the bottle was youthful and lively, everything you

hope for from a wine of this age. The wine out of

the blender, however, simply tasted older and, to

me, duller.

I once read that the musician Tom Petty

doesn’t like to use the Dolby feature on stereo

equipment. As a musician, he said, he wants to hear

all those hisses and pops and sounds in the high

upper range. Dolby, as I understand it, essentially

shaves off that upper layer of sound.

As a winemaker I see a corollary with aeration.

It can rob the wine of its full range. And I prefer

instead to allow the wine to change and evolve over

time in my glass.

Separating SedimentThe true dictionary definition of

decanting is to pour a liquid from

one vessel to another. In the case

of wine it’s when you pour an

older wine carefully into another

vessel for the purpose of separat-

ing the wine from the sediment

that has collected in the bottle.

With an older wine I do two

things. First, I stand the bottle

upright 24 hours before pulling the cork, giving

the sediment time to settle to the bottom. Then, I

simply pour the wine carefully out of the original

bottle into the glassware. (Remember, the shoulder

of the bottle is there to help collect sediment as the

wine is poured.) This exposes the wine to a mini-

mum of disturbance and allows an older beauty to

evolve in your glass.

Be gentle with an older wine. If it’s over-aerat-

ed or roughly decanted you’ll lose all those delicate

layers of flavor and aroma, which years of cellaring

are intended to produce.

Y

E n j o y i n g Y o u r W i n e

Shafer FAQsAnswering your questions about Hillside Select.

Q. If I order now, when will my order ship?A. We hold Hillside Select until the cooler month of

November to ensure that your wine won’t be exposed to extremes of heat in transit.

Q. Is there a way to purchase more Hillside Select than my current allocation?

A. Yes, if you don’t mind visiting our winery. We will release 2005 Hillside Select on September 1, 2009, and in keeping with Shafer tradition we have set aside a small allocation to sell to anyone who visits the winery. The limit is two bottles per purchaser and we typically sell through in one to three weeks.

Q. When should I drink my Hillside Select?A. That’s a bit like asking when you should fall in love. The

answer is: when you’re ready. We release the wine after four years of maturation here at the winery because we believe it can be enjoyed in the full spiritedness of youth. And as far as we can tell the majority of our customers drink their wine within ten years of release, or less. (Sometimes much less.) However, we also hear from passionate fans of this wine who believe that drinking Hillside Select prior to that 10-year anniver-sary should be a felony offense. Please consult the tasting notes in this booklet to get a sense of what appeals most to you.

Q. What’s the best way to remove an older cork?A. The safest way is to use a two-pronged wine opener

known as an Ah-So. With practice using this opener will give optimal results with a fragile cork. Please note that Hillside Select corks are longer than normal, requiring extra care when removing them from the bottle to avoid breakage.

S e l e c t e d Pa i r i n g srecenT food maTches We’ve enjoyed WiTh hillside selecT

Here’s a sample of some recent dishes that have gone nicely

with various vintages of Hillside Select. While we can’t provide

recipes, the descriptions alone provide delicious hints as to the

array of ingredients that enhance both what’s in the glass and on

the plate.

1994 Hillside Select Veal Breast and Basil Pesto Risotto

CraftSteak, Las Vegas

1999 Hillside Select Duo of Kobe Beef: Braised Short Rib with

Fricassee of Mushroom and Aged Striploin with

Casserole of Spring Beans

Tribecca Grill, New York

2001 Hillside Select Braised Whole Abalone with Cheese Sauce

Lotte Hotel, Seoul, Korea

2003 Hillside Select Stuffed Chicken

Breast with

Endive Brisee

and Apricot

Chutney

Shilla Hotel, Seoul,

Korea

2004 Hillside Select Char-grilled Lamb Cutlets with Garlic Roasted

Kipfler Potatoes and Braised Golden Shallots

J.W. Marriott Hotel, Hong Kong

Wine Blogs We’ve BookmarkedRemember when there were no wine blogs? That was way back at the start of ye olde 2004, according to Vinography.com. Today there are more than 550 in English alone and another 170 or so in languages including Italian, Japa-nese, Portuguese and Slovak. There’s even an annual wine bloggers conference as well as annual awards recognizing top writers and blogs.

Steve Heimoff ’s Blog @ steveheimoff.comWell-informed, unpretentious, refreshingly snarky at times, this veteran wine journalist and critic produces a blog worth your bookmark.

The Cork Board @ uncork29.com/blog/The Cork Board comes complete with timely photos, video and tangy entries that remind us of why we love living here.

Wine Library TV @ http://tv.winelibrary.com/You already know about Gary Vaynerchuk and the Vayniacs, right? If not, it’s time. Be careful, though, it’s addictive and so far there’s no patch.

Wine Industry Insight @ http://wineindustryin-sight.com/We’re hoping writer Lewis Perdue has a staff, otherwise we don’t know when he eats or sleeps. This site provides a keen “inside baseball” view of the wine industry.

Wine Review Online @ http://www.winereviewon-line.com/home.cfmThis site provides a great platform for the knowing, dynamic voices of Robert Whitley, Linda Murphy, Patrick Comiskey, Michael Apstein and others.

The Foodinista @ http://thefoodinista.wordpress.com/Wedged in with tasty food, fashion, and lip-smacking cocktail trends, you’ll find some delicious wine coverage too – all presented in canape-sized morsels.

start buying – getting into that whole thing of ‘how

do I get my hands on that?’ Like Harlan or Shafer.

Got very picky about which wine I was going to

have with dinner. One night it might have to be

Rubicon. Nothing else would do. It all had to be

just a certain way.

How has collecting changed for you over time?I don’t hoard it, pretending to buy wine as an

investment. I buy it because I want to drink it.

Also, I really do have a great time now collecting

all kinds of wines – Bordeaux, Australian wines

like Penfolds, Chilean wines are interesting to me,

South African. I’ll go online and read up about the

wines of a region and start tracking them down.

Lately it’s been New Zealand. I have to say, though,

the backbone of what I collect will probably always

be California Cabernets. That was my first love; it’s

tied in with where I was engaged, where I was mar-

ried: so many great, deeply-felt personal memories.

How do you store your wines?I’ve got a cellar at home where I have 200 to 250

bottles and off-site storage for another 500.

How do you decide which bottles you want easy access to at home?I just try to keep a good mix at home, a little of ev-

erything. But my off-site storage is only a mile from

my house so it’s not a huge thing to get there. I try

to visit about once a month and I’m always nicely

surprised by things I find tucked in the back that I’d

forgotten about.

Has wine ever shown up in any of your films?Not yet, but I’d like to bring it in sometime, if it

was an organic part of the story. I’d love that.

T h e P r o d u c e rhoW hollyWood Turned a film execuTive inTo a Wine collecTor

Richard Suckle is a

Philadelphia native who

got his start in Hollywood

in the mid-1990s as a

production executive on

movies including Twelve

Monkeys starring Bruce

Willis and Fallen star-

ring Denzel Washington.

He later produced two hugely successful family films: Scooby

Doo and Scooby Doo 2. His most recent film was The

International, a thriller that starred Clive Owen. This

member of Shafer’s Hillside Select list spoke with us recently

about his other love – that of wine and wine collecting.

Were you around wine growing up in Philadelphia?I had almost no exposure to wine. My parents had

a cabinet with Cutty Sark and a few other dusty

bottles, but it was just for company.

When did you discover wine?In 2001 I was in Australia filming the first Scooby

Doo movie and (actor) Matthew Lillard was into

wine big time – you know, the zealotry of the newly

converted. He’d just gotten married at Kenwood

in Sonoma and really talked up wine and wine

country. It was good timing because here I was on

the verge of getting engaged. And I’m listening to

Matt thinking, ‘if I’m going to ask my family and

my friends to travel all this way to a wedding, why

not ask them to go somewhere really great?’

When I got back to California, (my wife)

Maia and I drove up to Napa and Sonoma, started

visiting wineries and trying wines and I really

jumped in full force. We just drove up Silverado

Trail and stopped everywhere and tried everything.

Did you ever take a wine course or join a tasting group?No, because I got some great education from a

friend, Robert Kamen, who’s a screenwriter (wrote

Karate Kid, A Walk in the Clouds, Taken, and others). He

bought a vineyard in Sonoma in the ‘80s and now

he has a winery called Kamen Estate, really amazing

wines. It was Robert who really helped me to see

the subtler differences between wines and helped

me get into it hard core.

It sounds like collecting started for you with Cabernets? Yes, it was all California Cabs, Napa and Sonoma.

I went from trying everything to that stage of being

very specific, very picky, about what I wanted to

F e a t u r e d S h a f e r C o l l e c t o r

Continued from page 3

2002 This Hillside Select is classic Stags Leap District Cab-ernet Sauvignon from a justly celebrated Napa Valley vintage. Pure, wide-open, dark-fruit aromas and flavors. The movement from nose to mouth to supple tannin to lengthy finish is harmonious, offering a round, expan-sive, silky liquid feast of black cherry, rich plum, black fruit, cassis, and dark chocolate shot through with toasty vanilla, blueberry, and cedar. Strikes a balance between extract and elegance. Drink now – 18 years

2001 From the legendary 2001 vintage this Hillside Select of-fers aromatic, elegant blackberry and vanilla, loaded with black currant and cassis; round, rich, layered dark fruit flavors, with a balanced seasoning of minerals, tobacco, and herbs; a core of sweetness emerges from our small-berried hillside fruit with a long, mouth-filling finish of dark chocolate, vanilla and spice all surrounded by the classic silky tannins of the Stags Leap District. Drink now – 14 years

2000Shows a pleasing range of aromatics — black fruit, pepper, mineral, sweet-spicy vanilla and dense color. Beginning to show age characteristics of cedar and tobacco. A core of sweetness and supple, sweet tannins from our small-berried hillside fruit spread a chocolate-like rounded feel in the mouth and offer a lengthy finish. Drink now – 6 years

1999After ten years this one continues to fill the glass with aromatic brightness and in the mouth offers raspberry, blackberry, cola and a richness of fruit; its liveliness is just beginning to show a more mature balance of tobacco, herbs and minerals and a core of sweetness. This gener-

ously proportioned wine offers a long, lingering finish. Its masculine tannins are similar to the 1992 vintage of Hillside Select and continue to offer excellent aging potential. Drink now – 11 years

1998We wish we had more of this one in our cellar. It’s gor-geous. Deep color with soft tannins and luscious fruit typical of our hillside vineyards. Aromatics offer a blend of currants, vanilla and mineral in the mouth and a long fin-ish. This was our first vintage to perform berry selection in the vineyard ensuring that the fruit we harvested was the best of the vintage. That work shows here. Drink now – 6 years

1997Just when we thought this one would never grow up, we find it moving past primary fruit with elegant character-istics of cedar, tea and tobacco. Even so, expect the ’97 to remain lively for a few years to come as it still offers big mouthfeel, dark color, with flavors of chocolate and black fruit. A long finish of mocha, vanilla and spice is tied up with the classic tannins of the Stags Leap District. Drink now – 8 years

1996With more herbs, cedar and tea than its ’97 sibling, this one is embracing age. Ripe aromatics and big, balanced fruit flavors. Deep color in the center of the glass with brick at the edge, silky texture and maturing fruit, show-ing elements of black currant and dark spice with a long finish. Drink now – 5 years

1995At 14 years of age this Hillside Select still shows such richness — lively, lovely, dark and complex. Powerful, elegant and composed, with velvety brick color and maturing Cabernet flavors. Rich with great depth of flavor and a lingering finish. Drink now – 4 years