The Napa Valley
Napa County is a county located north of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is part of the Napa, California Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of 2000 the population is 124,279. The county seat is Napa. Napa County was one of the original counties of California, created in 1850 at the time of statehood. Parts of the county's territory were given to Lake County in 1861. The word napa is of Native American derivation and has been variously translated as "grizzly bear", "house", "motherland", & "fish". Of the many explanations of the name's origin, the most plausible seems to be that it is derived from the Patwin word napo meaning house, although local residents will often cite an urban legend that gives the translation as "you will always return".

Napa County, once the producer of many different crops, is known today for its wine industry, rising in the 1960s to the first rank of wine regions with France and Italy. Napa is a wine making region in the United States.

The Sonoma Valley
Cradled between the Mayacamas and Sonoma mountain ranges, the Sonoma Valley is the birthplace of California’s famed wine industry and the closest wine region to San Francisco, just 45 minutes north. It encompasses 17 miles of unparalleled beauty, including 13,000 acres of parkland. The eight-acre Sonoma Plaza is the largest town square of its kind in California and a National Historic Landmark, rimmed by carefully preserved adobe buildings. Up the road in Glen Ellen, author Jack London lived and wrote at his beloved Beauty Ranch, now an 800-acre state historic park.

Rick Bolen Photo“On the elevated sections of the road they felt the cool, delicious breeze from the Pacific forty miles away; while from each little dip and hollow came warm breaths of autumn earth, spicy with sunburnt grass and fallen leaves and passing flowers.”

—Jack London, “The Valley of the Moon” (1913)
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