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.
Long before the vineyards, this was the country of the Wappo. The Napa Valley Wappo lived in the valley and its surrounding hills for thousands of years, fishing the Napa River and its creeks, gathering acorns in the oak woodlands, and trading across the coast ranges. They knew this ground in fine detail centuries before the first survey stake went in, and an honest history of St. Helena begins with them — not as a footnote to the wine story, but as the valley's first and longest chapter.
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.
