The Napa Valley was originally inhabited by the Indigenous Wappo people, who built homes and villages throughout the region.

The 19th-century Gold Rush and its sudden influx of European residents helped turn California's Napa Valley into wine country.

The Napa Valley has unique growing conditions, a quality the wine industry refers to as 'terroir.'

Napa Valley was the second officially sanctioned wine-growing region in the US.

California's Napa Valley, one of the wine world's most famous regions, is home to some of the most valuable agricultural land in the US.

Mexican Americans have become a part of Napa's tradition

While the Napa wine world was largely homogenous for many decades, things are beginning to change. This short video highlights Mexican American winemakers in Napa, focusing on the story of Elias Fernandez of Shafer Vineyards. Fernandez began his wine journey as a migrant grape-picker and has been making wine for over 40 years. In 2008, his vintage won Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year.

Explore the wineries of the Napa Valley with an interactive map of its hundreds of wineries, vineyards, and tasting rooms.

Oral history and artifacts suggest the Wampanoag inhabited the area for 12,000 years

By 1621, Native Americans had been interacting with European explorers along the coasts for hundreds of years. European adventurers, including Giovanni da Verrazzano, mapped the coastline as early as 1524, as this timeline from the National Museum of the American Indian explains.

California's Napa Valley and Sonoma County both produce world-class wines, but they have key differences.

Food & Wine magazine's guide to the Napa Valley (and its next-door neighbor, Sonoma Valley) walks through the environmental and geological conditions that differentiate these two first-class wine regions from the rest of the world and from each other. It also includes in-depth explanations of what to look for in their wines, including common grapes, stylistic choices, and tasting notes.

Napa Valley is an internationally known wine destination, but it only produces only 4% of California's wine.

Napa Valley became a player on the international stage in the mid 1970s, when judges in a blind taste test deemed its wine superior to France's.

The Indigenous people of the central Californian coast made many advancements

The Indigenous people of the central Californian coast made advancements in basketry, small stone tools, the use of shell beads as currency, and plank canoes for seafaring. In the years before European contact, their numbers reach 25,000 across 150 settlements.

An estimated 40,000 Wampanoag populated 67 villages in the 1600s

For more than 10,000 years, native Wampanoag people have lived in and around Rhode Island and Massachusetts, especially in the islands known today as Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Roughly 5,000 dwell in the area today, after their numbers declined amid European migration.

A root lice infestation, transported from the East Coast, once destroyed over 80% of Napa's vines.

The Wampanoag Nation inhabited the northeastern coast of North America for 12,000 years before European contact killed an estimated two-thirds of their population in a single generation.

A 1980s soap opera helped popularize Napa Valley, broadcasting the idyllic wine country to millions of American viewers every week.

The Charles Krug Winery, established in 1861, is the oldest winery in the Napa Valley.

A map of Wampanoag territory in the 17th century

Around the time of the first Thanksgiving, the Wampanoag lived in a broad swath of New England, including Cape Cod and the islands ringing it. This map shows the historic territory of the tribe, complete with the native and contemporary names of towns and villages.

Native Americans developed pottery and religion, and experienced population growth during the Woodland period

Between 500 B.C.E. and 1100 C.E., Indigenous peoples produced pottery and practiced animism, a spiritual worldview in which animals, plants, and natural forces are believed to possess sacred power. They moved seasonally to make the most of available resources.

Wildfires and rising temperatures have seriously impacted Napa's winemaking in the 2020s.

View a detail list of the Napa Valley wines, dating all the way back to the 1991 vintage.

Experts say 2023 was a welcome year for Napa's wine

Many vintners say Napa’s 2023 vintage was a landmark year due to plentiful rain and a lack of extreme weather events, particularly extreme heat, which can stunt grapevine photosynthesis. The graph below illustrates the town of Calistoga's relatively cooler temperatures in 2023.

How winemaking has changed throughout history

Winemaking is an ancient practice, and researchers continue to find evidence that this ritual came even earlier than previously estimated. This article outlines five key turning points in wine’s history, from the fermentation of fruit by our primate ancestors to today’s increasingly popular “New World” wine. Discover the fascinating scientific and cultural factors that led to wine’s changes in flavor and increased symbolic importance.