The mountain's literary ghost is Robert Louis Stevenson. In the summer of 1880, broke and newly married, the young Scottish writer spent his honeymoon squatting in an abandoned miners' bunkhouse on the slopes of Mount St. Helena, at the played-out Silverado mine. He wrote the months up in The Silverado Squatters, and it was there, tasting the valley's young wines, that he set down the line wine country has quoted ever since — that wine is "bottled poetry." The peak and a state park on its flank both carry his memory today.
But it was wine that made the valley's name. By the 1860s and 1870s, growers had learned that the gravelly upper-valley benches and warm days were close to ideal for the vine, and a cluster of stone wineries rose around the town — some of the oldest in California, built of hand-cut stone with cellars dug back into the hillsides to hold the cool. Prohibition nearly killed the whole enterprise in the 1920s, and only a handful of cellars survived by making sacramental and medicinal wine; the revival that began in the 1960s turned the Napa Valley, with St. Helena at its heart, into one of the most famous wine regions on earth.
Why People Visit St Helena
St. Helena offers Napa Valley at its most walkable and unhurried — a real town in the middle of the vineyards, with deep wine heritage, a literary past, and the mountain overhead. Visitors come for the tasting country and the scenery and stay for the small-town stone streets and the easy pace. It is refined without being precious, and beautiful in every season.
