Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1037369
{ SOMMjournal.com } 93 Reasonably Tall Tales from the Hillsides In the heat of the afternoon, the somms gratefully sipped on the refreshing Shafer Vineyards Albariño as proprietor Doug Shafer waved in the direction of the swaths of hillside vineyards surrounding the modern-looking winery. "It's a box canyon, if you will, and all these ngers are Cabernet," he said. Standing on the manicured lawn surrounded by the hills, the brazen and hilarious Shafer doled out SLD "folklore" that seemed more like accurate his - torical accounts by an eyewitness. "You guys woke up and the SLD was all socked in with fog today, right?" Shafer asked the somms. "Then the fog rolls back and this is the breeze we get. My dad [Shafer Vineyards founder John Shafer] lives up on the hill and he's got a pool, so when my kids were little, they'd come down and go swimming in grandpa's pool. We lived in St. Helena at the time, and well, by 5 o' clock, it's too damn cold—St. Helena would be 90 degrees and here it'd be 70!" Shafer continued to tell personal stories involv - ing characters like Nathan Fay, John Goelet, Bernard Portet, and John Shafer himself, "a Chicago boy who didn't know [expletive] about [expletive]." That boy ended up being one of the rst American winegrow- ers to plant vines in the hills, "up there in the 'upper seven,'" Doug Shafer explained of the hillside vine- yards that face the bay. "The rst wine he made was a 1978 Cab, so we've basically been making the Hill- side Select for 40 years." Today, the Shafer Vineyards Hillside Select is one of Napa's most iconic wines. Doug Shafer, proprietor for Shafer Vineyards, among his vines. The "There-There" of THE SLD Over lunch at Shafer Vineyards, Chimney Rock Winery Winemaker Elizabeth Vianna and Kirk Grace, Director of Vineyard Operations at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, joined Shafer to talk about what Vianna deemed the SLD "there-there"—what sets it apart in terms of terroir—as a segue into another demonstrative tasting of the ageability of SLD wines. Shafer poked fun at Vianna for using the unconventional term, but the brilliant winemaker proved it to be a viable concept. "I couldn't think of a better place to start the conversation of the 'there-there' than with Stags Leap because the Pictured at the back table from left to right at Shafer Winery: Elizabeth Vianna, Winemaker for Chimney Rock Winery; Doug Shafer of Shafer Vineyards; Kirk Grace, Director of Vineyard Operations for Stag's Leap Wine Cellars; and Nancy Bialek, Executive Director for the Stags Leap District Winegrowers Association.