A Chicago publisher buys a hillside in Napa.

Shafer Vineyards stands below the Stags Leap palisades in the Napa Valley, in what is now the Stags Leap District. The winery says grapes were grown and wine was made commercially on the site from about 1880, and that vines were still being farmed there through Prohibition. Its modern history begins with an unlikely buyer.

John Shafer came to wine from publishing. Wine Spectator’s 2019 obituary of him says he flew a B-24 bomber in the Second World War, studied engineering at Cornell after the war and rose to vice president of long-range planning at Scott, Foresman & Co., the Chicago textbook publisher. In 1972, the magazine and the winery both say, he bought the Stags Leap property, a hillside planted with old vines that the magazine describes as unsuitable. The University of California Press, describing his son’s later memoir of the move, says he took his family west to California in 1973.

The first years were spent in the vineyard. Wine Spectator says Shafer terraced and replanted the hillsides, and the winery says the estate was planted to Cabernet Sauvignon in the mid-1970s. In 1978 he began full-scale winemaking and made the first Shafer wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from the newly planted vineyard, the winery says; Wine Spectator and the San Francisco Chronicle give the same vintage.

The family came into the cellar soon after. In 1983 John asked his son Doug Shafer to become the winemaker, according to Wine Spectator, and in 1994 made him president of the winery. Elias Fernandez joined as assistant winemaker in 1984 and became winemaker in 1994, the winery and Wine Spectator both say; the winery now marks his forty harvests on the property.

A hillside Cabernet, and a district drawn on the map.

The wine most closely tied to the name is Hillside Select. Wine Spectator says its first vintage was 1983, made from the best parcels of the estate and given a long time in barrel, and the magazine’s obituary credited the wine with helping to put the Stags Leap District on the map. The winery’s other labels include One Point Five, TD-9 and Relentless, Korea’s KED Global listed in 2022; Wine Spectator describes Relentless as a blend of Syrah and Petite Sirah, and Shanken News Daily noted that Wine Spectator named its 2008 vintage the magazine’s Wine of the Year in 2012.

The district name on the label is something the family helped create. Wine Spectator says that in 1985 Shafer and neighbouring vintners petitioned for Stags Leap to be recognised as a separate wine region, and that recognition took four years. English Wikipedia says the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms established the Stags Leap District American Viticultural Area on 26 January 1989. The district is written without an apostrophe; two neighbouring wineries spell the name differently, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and Stags’ Leap Winery.

The family also told the story in print. A Vineyard in Napa, by Doug Shafer with the Napa writer Andy Demsky, was published by the University of California Press in November 2012. The publisher describes it as the account of his father’s move from a Chicago suburb to a Napa vineyard with no winemaking experience, of the winery’s early struggles with pests and cellar mishaps, and of the effort to establish the Stags Leap appellation.

Shafer’s founder died in March 2019, Wine Spectator reported. By then the winery had long been run by the generation he brought into it.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Napa and California wineries: Opus One, Silver Oak, Ridge Vineyards, Shafer, Screaming Eagle, Joseph Phelps and Heitz Cellar. Wineries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family estates that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger owners, and a single wine can be sold everywhere from a winery’s own tasting room to a restaurant list.

A winery’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, bought or sold vineyards or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its grapes are grown and its wine is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its vineyards and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family estate sold to a Korean retail group.

After half a century in one family, Shafer changed hands in 2022. Shanken News Daily, the trade newsletter of Wine Spectator’s publisher, reported on 16 February 2022 that Shinsegae Property, a Seoul company in department stores, shopping centres, golf resorts and hotels, had bought Shafer Vineyards through its American subsidiary, Starfield Properties. KED Global described the buyer the same day as the real-estate arm of South Korea’s Shinsegae Group, and noted that the group’s wholesale unit, Shinsegae L&B, is Korea’s largest wine importer. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Shafer was Shinsegae’s first winery in the United States.

The estate that changed hands is larger than the original hillside. Shanken News Daily put it at 225 acres of vines on four ranches: two in the Stags Leap District, one in the Oak Knoll District and one in Carneros. It reported that the winery made about 33,000 cases a year, with 85 per cent of its fruit from those estate vineyards, which it called a rarity in modern Napa.

Continuity was the message of the sale. The announcement came from Doug Shafer as president, and the San Francisco Chronicle and Shanken News Daily both reported at the time that he and Elias Fernandez would stay in their roles under the new owner. Doug Shafer said that Shafer remained in good hands, the Chronicle reported.

The name needs a little care online. Shafer is a common surname; the winery’s own site is shafervineyards.com.

For a design guide, Shafer shows how a family winery can make one hillside, one district name and one founder’s story carry an identity through a change of ownership. Compare Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, its neighbour in the same district, and Caymus, the Wagner family’s Rutherford winery, also founded in 1972. For this guide we use palisade rust, hillside umber and dry grass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Shafer’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.