In 1972, a Windy City publishing exec named John Shafer ditched his career and moved his family out to Napa Valley, settling in what’s now the Stags Leap District, so he could pursue his dream of growing grapes and making wine. Never mind that he’d never grown anything more than a few flowers in the front yard.

The property he purchased had 30 acres of unruly vines that had been planted back in 1922, and for Shafer—in his mid-40s at the time—tearing them up and replanting represented about a lifetime’s worth of work.

But he couldn’t help taking on more.

Shafer was intrigued by the steep hillsides that comprise the warm amphitheater of the Stags Leap District. No one had dared attempt to plant them yet, but he saw huge potential because of the sun exposure and nutrient-poor soils, so he and his son Doug started clearing room for vines—even blasting apart truck-sized boulders with dynamite. Popular opinion of the project was captured in the name of the original plot: It became known as John’s Folly.

In 1978, he made a wine from the first newly planted block of hillside vines. When he released it to high praise in 1981, the world had its first taste of what would become one of the greatest wines in Napa Valley: Shafer Hillside Select.

In the years since, Shafer has earned a place not just among Napa’s elite, but internationally. Their bottles have garnered a slew of eye-popping scores from Robert Parker, who dubbed it “one of the world’s greatest wineries.” They’ve also cemented their place in Napa history: John, who passed away in 2019, led the effort to get the Stags Leap District designated an AVA, the winery pioneered sustainable agriculture in the region and became the first to generate 100 percent of its power needs with solar energy, and in 2010 John and Doug won the James Beard Foundation’s award for “Wine and Spirits Professionals of the Year.”