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.
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.
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.
