Full transcript
First Vines on the Valley Floor
Everything here starts with George C. Yount, a Missouri-frontier trapper who received an eleven-thousand-eight-hundred-eighty-seven-acre Mexican land grant in 1836 — the first ever given to a United States citizen in Napa Valley. He raised a mill, built his adobe, and in 1839 planted the valley's first grapevines, decades before anyone said Napa and fine wine in the same breath. He lies buried in the town's own Pioneer cemetery, a five-minute walk from wine bars bearing his name. Walk north to Jackson Street and find his grave marker.
The Saloon the Veterans Shut Down
In 1900 Scottish stonemason Pierre Guillaume finished a stone building on Washington Street meant to be a beer pub. It poured for six years until a ban on selling alcohol within a mile of the Veterans Home of California — established in 1884 as the first facility of its kind in the nation — forced it dry, and the building drifted through trades including, literally, laundry work. In 1978 it reopened as The French Laundry; in 1994 Thomas Keller bought it. Photograph the pink-quarry-tile courtyard gate before dinner service begins.
One Square Mile of Kitchens
Keller's French Laundry became a multi-Michelin-star institution, and he anchored the town further with Bouchon bistro and its bakery down the street. Other chefs followed the audience he built, so this mile-and-a-half-square town now holds an extraordinary concentration of top-rated kitchens, plus the Napa Valley Museum and Domaine Chandon just south. The Veterans Home remains the town's largest institution, housing around a thousand residents whose presence shaped its dry, orderly beginnings. Order a bread service at Bouchon Bakery and compare it against any croissant you have had.