Slouching Towards Calistoga

Since we moved out to the West Coast, Jane and I have spent some time becoming familiar with the various wine regions (apellations for the snobs) located between Baja and Vancouver. But while we've sampled wines from the Guadelupe Valley, Temecula, Santa Barbara, Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo, Sonoma Valley, and the Columbia, Willamette and Walla Walla Valleys, we had never been to arguably the most important of them all - Napa. This was partly due to an aversion on my part to Napa's reputation as an overpriced and snob-infested zone for Hummer limo tours and the swirling of wine in finely-crafted stemware. And we did come across a fair amount of wine-tasting-as-social-climbing. But we were also surprised at the number of small, family-run vineyards and wineries sprinkled all along the narrowing valley, in which owners and winemakers poured their own wines for us and spoke engagingly of their craft and approach. Many of the tastings were free or comped with purchases, and as we did our rounds mid-week, many times we had the tasting rooms all to ourselves. Dogs wandered in and out of the properties, windows were propped open to catch the cooling breezes, and everybody made helpful recommendations on where to stop next and what to check out - no fierce battles for supremacy here.

The result of such openness and consideration became apparent as the living room of our rental home began to fill up with wine boxes throughout the week. In the end, the four of us purchased 6 cases of wine - 72 bottles in all (with a few spare ones purchased and brought to restaurants). That's quite a bit (and far too much to lug home ourselves - the postal annex in Napa came in very handy), yet the quality was high. Looking over our purchases, it's clear we were attracted to both the larger operations' higher-end offerings and the budget-priced wines from the smaller winemakers. I'll try and break up these postings into different areas of focus, rather than load everything down with one massive chunk of information, and hope to outline the different wineries one by one. The vast majority of them deserve special mention.

The scenery was astonishing, in a gentle agricultural sense. In fact, despite Napa's growth since the late-1970s and their massive vine cultivation, it was through a far-sighted Agricultural Preserve ordinance in 1968 (the nation's first) that the area helped forever maintain the near-Edenic properties that first attracted settlers to the area. While large parts of temperate California stagger under poorly-planned sprawl and development, the Napa Valley remains calm, quiet, green and stubbornly rural (although the roadways get a little clogged on weekends). All of us, at one point on the trip, remarked how struck we were by the beauty and serenity of such a popular region (second only to Disneyland in California tourist numbers) and Jane remarked several times how much she longed to return to the farming regions of her childhood. With warm afternoons and cool, almost chilly, nights, the weather also neared perfection.

Oh, did I mention the food?