So Napa gathers a Patwin name, a river landing laid out in 1847, the county’s first wine cellar of 1859, vines that outlasted blight and Prohibition alike, and one Paris afternoon in 1976 that rearranged the wine world — and our Napa designs pour all of it into wearable form. Whether Napa is your hometown, your valley, your harvest season, or the place you learned what a morning fog can do to a row of vines, wear the history. Pressing grapes since 1861.
Napa was settled by a contract too — just signed in glasses instead of ink. On May 24, 1976, in Paris, wine merchant Steven Spurrier poured California wines against the great châteaux of France in a blind tasting before a panel of French judges — and when the scores came back, a Napa Valley cabernet and a Napa Valley chardonnay stood first. The Judgment of Paris, the papers called it. The judges were stunned, the wine world was rearranged overnight, and a quiet farm valley in Northern California became the most famous wine country in America. Napa has been pouring with that kind of confidence ever since.
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.
