History of Napa Valley

The First Vintages

Yount's vineyard near what is now Yountville was the valley's first, planted in the late 1830s, but it was two decades before Napa Valley had anything resembling a wine industry. That changed in 1858, when John Patchett built the valley's first commercial winery, proving wine could be made here at real scale rather than just for one household's table. Other growers followed quickly, and vineyards spread across the valley floor through the 1860s and 1870s as more settlers discovered that the same warm days and cool, foggy nights that made the valley pleasant to live in also made it an unusually good place to ripen a wine grape.

Krug, Schram, and Crabb

Charles Krug, a Prussian immigrant, opened the valley's second commercial winery in 1861 on land he received as part of his wife Carolina's dowry, and brought European winemaking techniques -- including the use of a cider press for crushing grapes -- that much of the young California wine industry would come to rely on. The following year, Jacob Schram carved cellars directly into a hillside above Calistoga to found Schramsberg, work so labor-intensive it later drew a visit from author Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote about touring the tunnels during his honeymoon in the valley. In 1868, H.W. Crabb planted what became the To-Kalon Vineyard near Oakville -- a name borrowed from ancient Greek meaning "the highest good" -- and built it into one of the valley's largest and most respected estates, distributing its wine nationally while collecting more than 400 different grape varieties to experiment with along the way.

Beringer and Inglenook

Jacob and Frederick Beringer, brothers who had learned winemaking in Germany's Rhine Valley, opened their winery in 1876 and dug hand-carved limestone tunnels into the hillside behind what is now their Rhine House. Three years later, Finnish sea captain Gustave Niebaum built Inglenook with the explicit ambition of making wine that could compete with Europe's best -- and by 1880 his confidence looked less like an outlier and more like a preview of what the whole valley was becoming, with 443 vineyards now planted across Napa County.

Setbacks

The valley's early momentum did not last unbroken. In the 1890s, the phylloxera louse, a tiny root-eating insect accidentally imported from the eastern United States, tore through California's vineyards, including Napa's, forcing growers to rip out and replant on resistant rootstock at enormous cost. A more complete shutdown followed in 1920, when Prohibition made commercial winemaking illegal nationwide. Most of Napa Valley's wineries closed for the thirteen years Prohibition lasted, and many vineyards were pulled out entirely in favor of prunes and walnuts, which were still legal to sell. A handful of wineries found a legal way through: Beaulieu Vineyard, founded by Georges de Latour in 1900, secured a contract to supply sacramental wine to Catholic churches nationwide and actually grew during Prohibition, producing more than a million gallons a year by the time it ended. Most others were not so fortunate. When Prohibition ended in 1933, the valley did not spring back quickly -- the Great Depression and, soon after, the Second World War pulled money and labor away from wine country for another decade and a half.