The Napa Valley, including Carneros (covered in the Southern Sonoma chapter), is roughly 35 miles long with two main roads running up each side of the valley and about half a dozen roads traversing the 2-4 miles between them. As far as the world’s major wine-making regions go this is baby-sized so don’t be intimidated.

Just north of Carneros is the city of <@B>Napa<@P> itself, the biggest settlement in the valley, home to many of the workers that keep the wine industry humming. It’s not the most attractive city and has traditionally been bypassed by tourists speeding to the big-name wineries farther north but Napa has recently made an effort to cash in on its Victorian history and riverside setting.

There are decades of neglect and bad architecture to counter, however, and the downtown revitalization is definitely a work in progress. Napa still lacks the compactness and style of other Wine Country destination towns like Sonoma, Healdsburg, or even St. Helena farther north. That is changing, however, as the city completes its massive flood defense program and new luxury hotels sprout along the newly-secured riverbanks. Even the Ritz-Carlton Company signed a letter of intent in 2007 for a huge Napa resort that will undoubtedly take the city up a notch or two in the wine country style stakes.

From Napa, the two main valley roads begin. The St. Helena Highway (U.S. 29) is the well-beaten path up the valley. It passes the town of Yountville, dominated by shops, restaurants, and inns, then whistles past sleepy Rutherford before hitting what has become almost the spiritual heart of the valley, St. Helena. This is the town that all others in Wine Country aspire to be. Pretty, upscale, full of boutiques and restaurants, yet still a fairly down-to-earth, functional place—except on those weekends when the world comes to visit and traffic slows to a crawl.

St. Helena and the surrounding big-name wineries are the main draw in this part of the valley and rural tranquillity quickly returns as the St. Helena Highway continues north to the narrow top of the valley, where sleepy Calistoga has an almost frontier-town feel to it--seemingly torn between maintaining its slumber and being awoken by attracting more tourists to its up-and-coming wineries and famous volcanic hot springs.

"Calistoga is also where the other main valley road, the Silverado Trail, ends. Named for a silver mine that it once served north of Calistoga, it runs from Napa along the foot of the eastern hills and is the shortcut used to get up and down the valley by locals in the summer when the other side of the valley is clogged. Anyone in a hurry to get to a spa appointment in Calistoga or a restaurant in Napa should seriously consider cutting across the valley to the Silverado Trail if there is heavy traffic on the St. Helena Highway.

This undulating, winding two-lane road remains almost eerily quiet at times, and feels like it’s in another valley altogether. It’s a road along which smaller wineries turn out some of the best wines in the valley with none of the hoopla of the big showoffs farther west. It’s also a road down which serious wine lovers might prefer to travel, sampling famous cabernet sauvignons in the Stags Leap or Rutherford appellations before heading up into the hills to some hidden gems on Howell Mountain or in the rural Chiles Valley.

Planning Your Time

So how can visitors make sense of all those wineries and avoid all the crowds? It’s a $10,000 question with about 10,000 different answers. Many visitors seem to follow a similar pattern, never making it much farther north than St. Helena and sticking to the western side of the valley. If you can avoid that pattern, you’re halfway to lowering your blood pressure.

The other key to enjoying the valley rather than being frustrated by it is plenty of planning. There’s so much to do and so many wineries to visit that anyone simply turning up without even a vague plan will end up with a headache even before drinking too much wine in the sun. Visitors can get away with no pre-planning in many other parts of Wine Country but not here.

Research the type of wine that wineries make before choosing which to visit, especially if you’re not a big red-wine drinker. This is, after all, the land of endless cabernet sauvignon, but it is also a land where plenty of stunning white wines, including champagne, are made. And if you are a big cabernet drinker, this can be the place to learn much more about the king of wines—how and why a Spring Mountain cabernet is different from a Rutherford cabernet, for example.

Alternatively, pick a non-wine-related theme for a day of touring. Wineries in Napa have necessarily become adept at distinguishing themselves from all their competitors to try to attract increasingly jaded visitors, a form of Wine Country evolution. Some rely on the reputation of their wines, others on art, caves, car collections, architecture, gardens, tours, history—the list is almost endless and provides endless employment opportunities for marketing folks.

When the crowds or choices all get too much, simply head for the hills, where healthy doses of nature help make the hidden wineries in the Mt. Veeder, Spring Mountain, or Chiles Valley appellations that much more enjoyable.

If possible, avoid the peak season that runs roughly from July-October. It brings peak crowds, particularly at weekends, peak hotel prices and peak daytime temperatures. March-May is perhaps the best time to visit, when the wet winter season is finally drying out, the temperatures are mild, the creeks flowing, and the vineyards are full of vivid yellow wild mustard or the bright green of fresh vine buds.

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