Napa Valley
Napa was the first wine region I ever saw. I worked the 1997 harvest at Chappellet on Pritchard Hill as a cellar hand and lived in Yountville, and everything I have done since started there. I have come back nearly every year. The valley I return to runs from the pinot noir and chardonnay in Carneros, where the fog comes off the bay, up through the cabernet on the valley floor, and out to the mountain fruit on both sides, Howell Mountain in the east and Spring Mountain in the west. Thirty miles end to end, and the wines at either end have nothing to do with each other. The winemakers take my call because they knew me when I was washing tanks all those years ago and for my support since then.
CULINARY ARTS
I lived four blocks from The French Laundry back in 1997. Three of Thomas Keller's restaurants sit within a few hundred metres in Yountville, and the Culinary Institute's western campus occupies the old Greystone cellar in St. Helena. I trained at the CIA myself. What people underestimate is the wine lists. Press in St. Helena carries Napa cabernet back decades, and the serious rooms here have library depth you will not find in New York, because the wineries are next door and the collectors live down the road. Close to a dozen master sommeliers call this valley home. We eat where the winemakers eat, which is sometimes the three star room and more often a table someone opened because we asked.
CULTURE & LEISURE
The valley collects art the way it collects cabernet. The Donum Estate in Carneros has more than fifty large sculptures standing out in the vineyard, Ai Weiwei and Louise Bourgeois among them, and you walk it with a glass in your hand. Di Rosa, a few minutes away, holds one of the largest collections of Northern California art anywhere. Calistoga at the top of the valley still runs on the geothermal springs that built it. And the Silverado Trail early on a weekday, before the valley wakes up, is the best thirty miles of road in American wine country.
ARTISAN TRADITIONS
Two of the great French cooperages, Seguin Moreau and Demptos, run barrel operations in Napa, so you can taste one wine out of ten different barrels here as easily as you can in Bordeaux. Long Meadow Ranch and Round Pond press olive oil from century-old trees. The ghost wineries, the stone buildings abandoned after phylloxera and Prohibition, are being brought back one at a time by people who care more about the masonry than the yield. These are the visits nobody puts on a tasting itinerary and they are usually the ones people talk about afterward.
FROM THE PRODUCERS TABLE
The relationships behind the region. Each profile is a first hand-account from years of direct work with the family.