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.
Today St. Helena is the quiet heart of the Napa Valley — a stone-built wine town between the Mayacamas and the Vacas, under the mountain that gave it its name. Its story runs from a Wappo homeland through a farm town's beginnings to the center of California wine, with Robert Louis Stevenson and a big red waterwheel along the way. Our St. Helena designs gather that identity into wearable form — the bear-and-1850 emblem, the mountain, and the vines. St. Helena, California: bottled poetry, worn plain.
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.
