The valley’s wine story then ran boom, bust, and rebirth: a national reputation by the 1880s, devastation by the phylloxera blight in the 1890s, and near-erasure under Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, when all but a handful of cellars went dark. The revival came in waves — Robert Mondavi’s 1966 winery opening announced a modern renaissance — and after the 1976 Judgment of Paris the valley never looked back: more than 400 wineries now work the thirty miles above town. Napa has taken its shakes, too — a 2014 earthquake rattled the historic downtown hard — and the city repaired its bricks and poured on.
The river built the first Napa: a Main Street that by the 1850s bustled with saddle horses and gold-country trade, a railroad north to the valley towns by 1868, and a courthouse square at the center of the new county seat. And the vines took root early — John Patchett opened the county’s first commercial winery in 1859, inside what is now the city itself, and the 1861 stone winery founded up-valley by Charles Krug still presses grapes today, among the oldest in California.
Why People Visit Napa California
Napa offers a 30-mile valley between two mountain ranges, an 1861 stone winery among California’s oldest still pressing on Highway 29, the modernist estates of the 1966 renaissance, and the legacy of the 1976 Judgment of Paris when the valley's wines beat Bordeaux and Burgundy on neutral ground and rewired the global wine map. Visitors come for the wine, the Mayacamas-and-Vacas geography, the diurnal fog and the long hang time, the historic estates, the Calistoga geysers, Lake Berryessa, Mount St. Helena, and the simple riverfront pleasure of the city of Napa itself. It is the valley that everyone has heard of, and it earns the reputation every harvest.
