Napa Valley: Wine Tasting Day

You can’t stay in Sonoma County for a week and not go to Napa. It would be like visiting Paris and skipping the Eiffel Tower on principle — technically possible, and you could probably construct a whole argument about authenticity, but at some point you’d know you’d just avoided the thing. So on Wednesday morning I drove east from Petaluma over the rolling brown hills that separate Sonoma from Napa, and gave myself a day in the most famous wine valley in the country.

The Drive Over

The drive from Petaluma to Napa takes about thirty minutes, and the landscape summarizes the whole situation pretty efficiently. You start in the gentle dairy-and-vineyard country around Petaluma, climb over a low pass, and drop down into the Napa Valley, which is narrower and warmer and more deliberate than anything on the Sonoma side. The vineyards here are precise — rows of vines running in perfectly even lines up to the base of the Mayacamas Mountains on one side and the Vaca Mountains on the other. It looks like someone organized the entire valley with a ruler and then a level.

The temperature climbed as I came down into the valley. Petaluma had been in the low seventies with fog threatening. Napa was at ninety and cloudless. The heat here is dry and still — a different animal from the coastal humidity I’d been in — and it’s the kind of heat that immediately explains why the grapes are happy. It concentrates everything: the smells, the colors, the increasingly urgent desire for something cold and white.

I detoured through Sonoma Plaza on the way, which was worth it. The Plaza is a historic town square surrounded by wine tasting rooms, restaurants, and the kind of Spanish colonial architecture that says this county has been doing this for a while. I had coffee, walked around, took some photos, and then continued east into Napa proper.

The Valley

Napa Valley is about thirty miles long and only a few miles wide, and it packs in a genuinely absurd density of wineries, tasting rooms, and restaurants per square mile. Highway 29 runs up the center of it like a spine, and roughly every half mile there’s another sign for another winery — another stone entrance flanked by cypress trees, another driveway disappearing into perfectly manicured rows of vines. The whole thing operates at a scale that’s hard to absorb from a car. You’d need a week to do it properly, and people do take that week.

The architecture ranges from Tuscan villa to modern minimalist glass box to genuine castle. Some of these places are clearly designed to make you feel like you’ve wandered into a Provençal estate. Others are going for design-forward contemporary. All of them are, when you get down to it, designed to make you buy wine. Most of them succeed at this. The conversion rate at a Napa tasting room is probably pretty high.

The bougainvillea was everywhere. Cascading over walls, climbing trellises, erupting in magenta and red against stone facades. It’s a plant that looks like it’s showing off, and in Napa it has a whole supporting cast — roses, lavender, oleander, perfectly trimmed hedges, specimen trees placed exactly where they’ll look best in photographs. The landscaping at these wineries is as curated as the wine lists. Walking through the grounds felt less like visiting an agricultural operation and more like attending a very expensive garden party that happens to also have a cellar.

Yountville

I stopped in Yountville, which is a town of about 3,000 people that somehow has multiple Michelin-starred restaurants within walking distance of each other. It’s essentially one main street — Washington Street — lined with tasting rooms and galleries and restaurants that would be considered destination dining anywhere else. The French Laundry is here. I did not eat at the French Laundry, because I hadn’t made a reservation two months in advance and also because I haven’t won any lotteries recently.

What I actually liked about Yountville was the scale. You park once and walk to everything. Nothing is more than two stories. Trees shade the sidewalks. Benches appear at the right intervals. It has the feeling of a place designed for people who have made a deliberate decision to slow down and pay careful attention to what they’re eating and drinking — which is probably exactly the kind of people who come here. I am, if I’m being honest, not that person most of the time, but Yountville made me want to be.

I did a couple of tastings. The wine was excellent — this is Napa, so the quality floor is high and the stuff that doesn’t make the cut just doesn’t get poured in front of tourists. The Cabernet Sauvignons were big and structured, the way Napa Cabs are supposed to be. The Sauvignon Blanc I had somewhere in the afternoon was cold and crisp and exactly what ninety degrees called for. I sat on a patio watching rows of grapevines stretch away toward the mountains and thought: this is not a bad way to spend a Wednesday.

The Golden Afternoon

By late afternoon the light was doing that thing it does in the valley — going sideways and golden, turning vine leaves translucent, casting long shadows across the gravel paths between tasting rooms. This is when Napa is at its most persuasive. The heat starts to ease. The shadows go long. Everything looks like it belongs in a memory you’re in the process of making. I took a lot of photos in this light, and most of them are better than my photos usually are, which I credit to the location rather than my skill.

I drove back to Petaluma as the sun dropped, taking the back roads through the Carneros region at the southern end of the valley. The Carneros is where Napa and Sonoma blur together — wide open grassland, sheep on the hillsides, wind-bent oaks, not a tasting room in sight. After a full day of curated beauty, the rawness of it was actually a relief. Some good palette cleansers feel like a different kind of luxury.

Here’s my honest read on Napa: it’s polished, it’s expensive, and it knows exactly what it’s selling. That puts some people off. I get it. But the wine is genuinely world-class, the valley is genuinely beautiful, and the people working there — the pourers, the growers, the folks behind the counter who have clearly tasted everything and have actual opinions — they really do love what they do. You can be cynical about Napa or you can drink the wine. I’d recommend the wine.

I got back to Petaluma, opened a bottle I’d bought that afternoon, and sat on the porch watching the fog roll in from the coast. Two weeks ago I was on a train crossing Montana. Now I was in wine country drinking Cabernet while the fog came in. This trip keeps changing shape on me, and I keep deciding that’s fine.