Napa Valley Wine History: How America’s Great Wine Region Was Built Twice

Napa Valley is America’s most celebrated wine region — but its greatness is a comeback story. Napa was built, destroyed, and then built again, and almost everything it is today dates only from the 1960s.

In little more than a century Napa went from wilderness to boomtown to near-total ruin — wrecked first by an insect and then by its own government — before a handful of determined winemakers rebuilt it into a region that could beat France at its own game. This is how that happened.

The pioneers: planting a valley (1839–1889)

The first wine grapes in Napa were planted by the pioneer George Calvert Yount in the late 1830s (usually given as 1839).¹ A commercial industry followed in 1861, when Charles Krug established what is generally credited as Napa’s first commercial winery.¹² The valley’s combination of climate and soil proved ideal, and growth was explosive: by 1889 more than 140 wineries were operating, among them names that still matter — Schramsberg, Beringer and Inglenook.²

The double catastrophe: phylloxera and Prohibition

Then it fell apart. In the 1890s the root louse phylloxera swept the valley, destroying the great majority of its vines — part of the global epidemic that had already devastated Europe.² Growers were still recovering when a second, man-made disaster arrived: National Prohibition, in force from 1920. Over the following thirteen years almost every winery that had survived the insect closed its doors.²³ By the end of Prohibition in 1933, the thriving industry of the 1880s had all but vanished.

The renaissance: Mondavi and the Judgment of Paris

Recovery was slow, and the modern era has a clear starting gun: in 1966, Robert Mondavi opened the first major new Napa winery since Prohibition, built to make world-class wine and to say so loudly.⁴ The gamble was vindicated a decade later in the most famous tasting in history. At the 1976 Judgment of Paris, a panel of French judges tasting blind ranked Napa wines above the great names of France — a Stag’s Leap Cabernet and a Chateau Montelena Chardonnay taking the top places and announcing Napa to the world.⁴⁵

Recognition followed fast. In 1981 Napa Valley became California’s first American Viticultural Area (AVA) — and the first for a major wine region. (The very first AVA in the country was tiny Augusta, Missouri, approved in 1980; Napa’s petition was filed earlier but approved months later.) The AVA was the United States’ answer to the French appellation, formally defining Napa as a place whose name meant something.⁶ And in a strange echo of the 1890s, phylloxera returned in the late 1980s: much of the valley had been replanted on a rootstock (AXR1) that proved not to be resistant after all, forcing a massive and expensive replanting from 1991 — which growers used to plant smarter, better vineyards.⁷

Napa today

Modern Napa is a small region with an outsized name — a fraction of California’s vineyard acreage but the source of many of its most sought-after wines, above all Cabernet Sauvignon. Its story is why the valley guards that name so fiercely, and why a bottle labelled “Napa Valley” still carries the weight of a place that had to be built twice.

Explore Napa’s story

• The history of Inglenook, Napa’s great founding estate
• The Napa Valley Wine Train
• AXR1: how Napa replanted after phylloxera struck twice
• The Judgment of Paris, 1976
• Winemaking during Prohibition

References

1. George Yount plants Napa’s first vines (1839); Charles Krug’s first commercial winery (1861) — corroborated. ↩
2. Napa Valley Vintners / WineFolly Napa history: 140+ wineries by 1889; phylloxera in the 1890s. ↩
3. U.S. Prohibition (1920–1933) and its effect on Napa (corroborated). ↩
4. Robert Mondavi Winery founded 1966; the modern Napa revival (corroborated). ↩
5. The Judgment of Paris, 1976 — Stag’s Leap (red) and Chateau Montelena (white) top their flights. ↩
6. Napa Valley established as California’s first AVA, 1981 (second in the U.S. after Augusta, Missouri, 1980). ↩
7. Late-1980s phylloxera on AXR1 rootstock; replanting from 1991 (corroborated). ↩

Want to read more? Try these books

Judgment of Paris George M. Taber

The Story of Wine Hugh Johnson

The Oxford Companion to Wine Jancis Robinson (ed.)

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