Napa Valley Dispatch

Destination links from my travel research, and my Napa Valley map guide of spots to stay in, dine in, and explore

I spent Labor Day Weekend of 2022 escaping the 107-degree weather in Los Angeles in exchange for 107-degree weather in Napa Valley. Blah. But the wine helped. I will be direct: I went into this trip with the impression that Napa Valley is adult Disneyland, and I left having solidified the thought that this region of Northern California, and any area in which you are a visitor, really, is what you make of it. I made of it a splendid time, and here is why.

Losing the Control-Freak

Has Napa Valley become overridden with reservation requirements everywhere, from the wineries to the restaurants? I don’t know. The last time I was there was as a kid with my parents roadtripping from LA to SF. It was indeed difficult this time around, though, to get to the spots I had on my list, since many of the places were booked up well in advance. But this is where the “oh well, next time?” attitude shines best. It was tough to swallow the bitterness of being unable to explore the exact spots I had hoped, but therein was the magic of letting some spontaneity dictate the day. And with spontaneity comes the loss of the control freak, and with that comes an exhilarating sense of adventure, beautifully coupled with the rolling hilly curvatures of the connecting roads between Saint Helena and Sonoma County.

Embracing a Slower Pace

Being in nature invariably slows down the busy bustle of one’s everyday life, and invites the charm of seclusion. Being far enough from the humdrum of daily worries and close enough to the bewildered wonder of seeing lush greens and wheat-colored fields, grapevines producing some of the world’s best-known wines, our internal thoughts creating protective barriers against the erosive effects of city life. The German sociologist Georg Simmel in a 1904 essay wrote,

“Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e., his mind is stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded. Lasting impressions, the slightness in their differences, the habituated regularity of their course and contrasts between them, consume, so to speak, less mental energy than the rapid 2 telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli. To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions—with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life—it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence.”

But it was also Simmel who observed that

“the metropolitan type—which naturally takes on a thousand individual modifications—creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it. Instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner, thus creating a mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness, which in turn is caused by it. Thus the reaction of the metropolitan person to those events is moved to a sphere of mental activity which is least sensitive and which is furthest removed from the depths of the personality.”

And so, at least for the city dweller, a place like Napa Valley can offer a respite from being blasé, which Simmel defines as adopting an outlook that is an “incapacity to react to new stimulations.” A change of scenery—toward slowness, quietness, stillness, and nature—helps create mental road repairs that make city life worth the everyday mental drive.

Visual Feast

My eyes were filled with aesthetic, architectural bliss. From explorations of hotel properties that defined for me what eclectic style stands for; to the clean, crisp delight of furniture stores; to the quirky eateries and shops that dotted the landscape of the California nook that has been attracting worldwide guests since at least the 1970’s, it was all a source of design inspiration.

Damn Good Sustenance

The food, the drinks, the activities. Crème de la crème.

With that said, here is my [glorified? humble? you pick!] list of places that provided me with a good jumping-off point from which I can happily spend the rest of my visits to Napa catapulting and adding on to.