Except in the fall, when the leaves are gone from the vines and the parched lowlands not yet green, Napa and Sonoma are both spectacularly beautiful. To one who knows Europe they recall southern Tuscany, or the hilly country behind Gibraltar, or the Valley of the Durance, east of Avignon. In every sheltered corner of the hills there are orange and lemon trees; the venerable live oaks and madrona trees stand alone in their fields like trees in a Poussin landscape, and the whole district has a sort of half-classical, almost Roman air.
As far as vineyards are concerned, Napa consists of the Napa Valley. Sonoma, farther west, includes not only the shallow little valley of Sonoma Creek, but the much more extensive and more important Russian River country, around Guerneville and Healdsburg and Asti, to the north.
The two valleys, Napa and Sonoma, some fifteen miles apart, run northwestward like parallel fingers from the marshy lowlands along the bay shore. Neither one, at its southern end, looks much like a valley—rather like a little depression in a district of irregular and rolling hills. But the hills, as you go north, become higher and more impressive, their upper slopes heavily wooded and covered with an almost impassable tangle of manzanita and laurel and California holly. The vineyards, few at first and scattered, become larger and more numerous, covering the whole narrowing floor of the valley, running back into the hills, forming a patchwork of lighter green among the firs and cedars of the uplands.
Together the two valleys, with the range of hills—known as the Mayacamas Mountains—which separates them, form one of the great viticultural districts of the world, capable of yielding with time and patience wines as fine as any that France and Germany have produced. Three-quarters of a century ago, it seemed that this promise was well on its way to fulfillment, and Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent some months near St. Helena, in the Napa Valley, could write:
“Wine in California is still in the experimental stage…. The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for precious metals: the wine-grower also ‘prospects.’ One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another. … So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. These lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; these virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under the sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of California earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.”
By 1900 there were at least sixty or seventy prosperous wineries in the Napa Valley; scores of little corners in the Mayacamas uplands had been cleared, in search of those “Bonanzas” of which Stevenson wrote; Napa wines had become famous, not only in San Francisco, but in New York; and they had even won medals and acclaim in expostions abroad. Over 18,000 acres in Napa County were planted to vines, a high proportion of the vines were of good varieties, and a high proportion of the vineyards were on the upland slopes, rather than on the flat, alluvial, too-fertile valley floor.
All of this peaceful, pictureesque, and industrious little world, which had been so laboriously created, mostly by French and German settlers and Chinese labor, over a period of six decades, was destroyed by national prohibition in a matter of months. The hill vineyards were abandoned to the tangled brushwood that surrounded them; the lower vineyards were replanted in tough, productive grapes that would stand transcontinental shipment to home wine-makers in the East; the wineries, one by one, fell into disuse and ruin. Only a few survived the holocaust and by making sacramental wine eked out a precarious existence until repeal. Out of more than threescore Napa producers in 1917, Inglenook, Beaulieu, and Beringer alone are still operating on a major scale and still in the hands of the families that owned them prior to prohibition.
The past fifteen years have undone a good deal, but by no means all, of the mischief worked by the Eighteenth Amendment. The wineries are busy and most of them prosperous again, even if some of the old buildings proved beyond repair. The rolling foothills are once more covered with the orderly regiments of newly staked young vines, and a few courageous pioneers are even trying to bring back into production the mountain vineyards that once were responsible for Napa's finest wines.
The shady and sleepy little town of Napa, at the valley's southern end, has never been much of a center of the wine trae—its major vineyard before prohibition was Judge Stanly's La Loma, which, southwest of the town, slopes gently down behind its enormous eucalyptus trees to tidewater. Napa Creek is really an estuary rather than a river, and a mile south of the town, as often as not, you can see the funnels and superstructure of an ocean-going ship rising out of what appears to be pasture-land, with no water in sight.
Two parallel roads and an unimpressive little single-track railway line run northwest from Napa into the vineyard country. One of these roads (the poorer, incidentally) is the picturesque, winding Silverado Trail, of which Stevenson wrote, in his silverado squatters, over sixty year ago; the other, less romantically named Route 29, skirts most of the major vineyards and passes within a few hundred yards of the important wineries. In Yountville, a dozen miles from Napa, is the old brick Groezinger winery, once the Valley's largest and at last active again under the name Mountain View. A little farther north, near Oakville, is To Kalon, where, fifty years ago, Hiram W. Crabb Used to make What was regarded as the best Burgundy of California. It is now owned by Mr. Martin Stelling and undergoing a major renaissance.
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