Saint Helena: The Heart of the Napa Valley
Near St. Helena, California
Welcome to Saint Helena, a town that likes to call itself the heart of the Napa Valley, and for once the slogan is earned. You are standing on Main Street, a stretch of native stone storefronts that has fed, watered, and bankrolled California wine for more than a century and a half. The story begins with a settler named Henry Still, who put up the first store here in eighteen fifty three, then gave away free lots to lure other merchants north from the county seat at Napa.
By eighteen fifty four he and a partner had bought a one hundred twenty six acre tract from Maria Soberanes Bale, the widow whose family once held much of the upper valley as a Mexican land grant called Rancho Carne Humana. A schoolhouse and a small Baptist church followed, and in eighteen sixty two a visiting Yale geologist named William Brewer described a pretty little village of fifty or more houses. It became an official town in eighteen seventy six.
What set Saint Helena apart was the ground itself. The volcanic and gravel soils of the valley floor turned out to be extraordinary for wine grapes, and the pioneers noticed early. Charles Krug planted here in eighteen sixty one and founded Napa's oldest operating winery just up the road.
The Beringer brothers arrived in the eighteen seventies, the great stone Greystone cellar rose in eighteen eighty nine, and by that year the valley counted more than one hundred forty wineries. Then came catastrophe. The root louse phylloxera destroyed the vineyards in the eighteen nineties, and national Prohibition finished the job after nineteen twenty.
Farmers pulled out vines and planted walnuts and prunes to survive. The comeback took most of a century, and it climaxed far from here, at a blind tasting in Paris in nineteen seventy six, where California wines humbled the French and put Napa on the world map. Today Saint Helena sits at the center of that revival, its downtown stonework, its bridges, its grist mill, and its cellars all still standing.
Take your time. Almost everything you will see was built by people betting on this soil.
