What’s with the name? Long before the vines, this was the homeland of the Wappo and Patwin peoples — the name Napa itself comes from a Patwin word whose exact meaning is still debated — and, as across California, colonization took a devastating toll on them; their descendants remain part of the valley’s story today. The Mexican rancho era carved the land into grants like Rancho Entre Napa, and in 1847 a twenty-one-year-old settler named Nathan Coombs laid out “Nappa City” at the confluence of the Napa River and Napa Creek — the uppermost point a boat could navigate, which made it a natural landing. The steamboat Dolphin reached town in 1850, and Napa incorporated in 1872.
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.
