Napa Valley

Background

Some of the most valuable agricultural land in the US is located in California’s Napa Valley. The price per acre can exceed $500K because some of the best wines in the world are grown and produced there.

A roughly 30-mile-long valley about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, Napa has more than 400 wineries employing upward of 44,000 people and drawing in nearly 4 million visitors per year. Despite its outsized influence in California wine, Napa produces only 4% of the state’s annual wine production.

Geography

Surrounded by mountains on three sides, the combination of cold air from the Pacific coast and warm air from inland give Napa a unique terroir, the French term for the “sense of place” that growing conditions impart on a wine.

This combination of warm and cool conditions is ideal for grape-growing—sun to feed the vines, mountain shade and ocean fog to keep them from ripening too quickly. Different grapes flourish in different areas of the valley depending on their optimal growing conditions.

Napa also has multiple different types of soils, each imparting different characteristics to the grapes grown there. Cabernet sauvignon grows well in mountainous areas, where the soil is thin and rocky, while river-adjacent vineyards have silt and clay soil that lends itself to wines like sauvignon blanc.

The unique confluence of these atmospheric and geographic conditions is what gives Napa wines their identity.

History

Once known as Talahalusi, meaning “beautiful land,” the Napa Valley was inhabited by the Indigenous Wappo people for 10,000 years before the arrival of Spanish missionaries and colonists in the early 1800s. Indigenous practices like controlled burns of the dry brush helped shape the fertility of the land for future agriculture.

In the 1830s, the arrival of settlers carrying European rootstock grape vines to Napa kickstarted the valley’s wine industry. Ten years later, the Gold Rush brought scores of wine-loving Europeans and their descendants to the area. Recognizing an opportunity, Charles Krug opened the valley’s first commercial winery in 1861––which produces bottles to this day.

In the late 1860s, an infestation of root lice nearly destroyed the global wine industry. European rootstock, now planted across multiple continents, had no natural defenses against the pests; more than 80% of Napa’s vines were destroyed by 1900. It took decades for the industry to recover.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was established in 1972 in part to regulate the production and sale of alcohol in the US. In 1979, the ATF created the American Viticultural Area system. Modeled on similar European systems, it delineated wine-growing regions in the United States. Napa Valley was the second AVA established—the first was in Missouri. Now, any wine labeled with the Napa Valley AVA must source 100% of its grapes from that area.

Significant Wines and Vintages

Cabernet sauvignon is Napa’s most popular grape, comprising 40% of production, followed by chardonnay.

Napa’s 1997 vintage (meaning the year the grapes were harvested) is widely considered to be its best. A long, mild growing season led to wines that were noticeably more complex than their predecessors; the vintage set the tone for Napa’s stylistic hallmarks going forward.

Many vintners say Napa’s 2023 vintage was another landmark year due to plentiful rain and a lack of extreme weather events. 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.