St. Helena, California, was already the center of Napa Valley winemaking when I moved there in the last week of 1979 to take a newspaper job. But you wouldn’t have known it, taking a close look at Main Street where the St. Helena Star, my new employer, had its reporters banging out their news stories on manual typewriters.
A dive hotel that charged $30 a night stood across the street, waiting to be transformed into a luxury B&B. A Western Auto store sold motor oil and head gaskets nearby, waiting to become a women’s fashion boutique, and the meeting hall of the Native Sons of the Golden West three blocks away was the hottest theatrical venue.
This Napa Valley hamlet of 3,000 looked like Anytown, USA, at the beginning of the 1980s. But it was already undergoing a transformation that would make the word “Napa” mean something other than auto parts. It would make the 30-mile-long valley a playground for affluent Americans discovering the pleasures of good wine and the lifestyle that Napa wineries attached to it.
The transformation gelled around a French grape variety of the genus and species Vitis vinifera that is now a household word—Cabernet Sauvignon. A native of Bordeaux, Cabernet Sauvignon was not new to the Napa Valley, nor was winemaking. The monuments to the valley’s first boom period in the 1880s still stand impressively along Highway 29—the wineries of Trefethen, Inglenook, Charles Krug and Beringer, to name a few.
Great Cabernet Sauvignon wines from the 1930s through ’60s
