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

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.

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

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

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

Visualizing California's wine production

While Europe has France, Italy, and Spain, the US has California. The bulk of US wine production takes place in the Golden State, accounting for roughly two-thirds of the United States’ nearly 800 million gallons produced each year. This chart compares California and United States wine production from 1995 through 2022. Production in both has been trending down for several years, partially due to extreme weather events.

Santa Barbara County features seven designated wine regions

Grapes are notoriously fickle about where they grow and cannot be cultivated just anywhere. That’s what makes the county’s seven American Viticultural Areas so unique and cool—from the Santa Ynez valley to the Los Olivos District.

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

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.

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

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

A blind taste test in 1976 determined that California produced better wine than France in a decision known as 'the Judgment of Paris' that realigned the wine world.

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.

One expert said Napa's 2023 vintage was one of its best

Karen MacNeil, author of "The Wine Bible," called it “as perfect as any Napa vintage in living memory,” and suggests the wines will only become more impressive with age.

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

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

The top wine-producing countries in the world

Three European countries dominate the world in wine production: France, Italy, and Spain. This table lays out how the world's top wine-producing countries compare in terms of annual volume, with Europe and the United States comprising the bulk of production. Visualize the country-by-country difference with this bar graph.

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

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

California is one of the world’s 35 biodiversity hotspots

The state comprises the hotspot known as the California Floristic Province, where roughly 3,000 species of vascular plants grow—roughly three-fifths of which are found nowhere else in the world (also known as endemic).