Napa Valley, Reconsidered

"We're the barrel guys," our guide announced as he dipped a long glass pipe into a barrel and dispensed for each member of our group a couple of swallows of wine. Del Dotto is a winery with a mission: to demonstrate the nuances of flavor that various types of oak barrels impart to wine. Though the attitude at Del Dotto seemed at first glance frivolous, its Cabernets, we had read, consistently earn high ratings from the people who take tastings most seriously. The tour turned out to be fascinating and instructive, but never didactic. In fact, our chummy leader was positively bibulous; with each successive comparison (the same wine aged in oak from different forests in France), the group began to catch his spirit and roar at his jokes.

That evening we went to Angèle, a restaurant that overlooks the Napa River. Like many Napa restaurants, it gets its inspiration from somewhere between Paris and Aix-en-Provence. But there are no RICARD or GAULOISES signs on display, and the signature cocktails use Napa's own version of the anise-flavored spirit, from the boutique Spring Mountain distillery Domaine Charbay. The kitchen at Angèle turns out contemporary spins on Provençal cuisine, such as a brilliant oxtail and lentil salad, and the lively patio scene typifies the casual energy of dining out in Napa these days.

The so-called Chefs Market on Friday nights takes that vitality to the streets. While there are excellent produce vendors to be found here, the real draw is the street fair. There's live music on virtually every corner as well as food stands selling free-range barbecued chicken, bottled beer booths, and roving bands of giddy middle schoolers. It's exactly the sort of wholesome block party that in another, bigger city might be a dreary, underattended affair. In Napa, it is the place to be. In a town where even prom parties are held among barrels of Cabernet, we'd feared that the teenagers would all be indoors, studying their Brix levels, but they were all here—packs of pierced Goths, droopy-lidded skaters, Britney look-alikes. The wait for the barbecued oysters is 20 minutes, but nobody's complaining.

We'd heard that the area had rediscovered its roots, but we never imagined we'd get as close to them as we did at the Frog's Leap winery in Rutherford, digging in the dirt with its founder, John Williams. We were drawn to Frog's Leap because organic, sustainable growers—long considered hippies with no business skills—are being heral-ded as the new geniuses, and Frog's Leap, founded in 1981, was one of the first organic wineries in the modern era.

Williams, a fiftysomething man with a close-cropped beard and a wide sombrero, refers occasionally to "the life force" and could have wandered off Haight Street in an earlier decade, but he is among the savviest organic growers in the valley. The soil of Williams's vineyards (and the vines that grow there) is so well adjusted and so vigorous that he is one of the few valley farmers who do not have to use irrigation.

"A healthy pound of soil will hold nine pounds of water," Williams said, striding out into the vineyard, a spade resting at his shoulder. There hadn't been a drop of rain for six weeks, and the surface of the soil looked parched around the vines. But when Williams dug out a shovelful, he turned it over to reveal dark, black, wet earth. We grabbed damp handfuls—the dirt had a mellow scent that suggested cocoa powder, simmering mushrooms, and wilted greens. "It smells like a living thing," he said, beaming with the satisfaction of a man whose wines sell out year after year.

Whether the tasting and touring experience is roundly holistic, as it is at Frog's Leap, or unabashedly hedonistic, as in the case of Del Dotto Vineyards (or "Del Blotto," as we'd later hear it called), Napa wineries are doing an admirable job of distinguishing themselves from one another, both in the style of their wines and the way in which their grapes are grown. Nontraditional Napa grapes like Sangiovese (the chief grape of Chianti) and Petit Verdot (a peppery component in Bordeaux blends) are being cultivated experimentally and may find a place here. In the past few years, Napa has added more American Viticultural Areas, or AVA's, to its portfolio of sub-growing regions, which has brought increased attention to differences in terroir. Microclimates (and the nuanced flavors they produce) can be so extreme as to undercut the notion of a single "Napa" style.

In the world of haute cuisine, however, that four-letter word means one restaurant: French Laundry. We were fairly giddy early that evening as we glided to a halt alongside an unassuming frame building on a quiet Yountville avenue. The fact that Thomas Keller's much-lauded restaurant, which more than one esteemed critic has called "the best restaurant in America," had reopened just two weeks earlier after a five-month hiatus only added to the jitters. In the darkened hush of the dining room, we found a few tables of wine-industry bigwigs entertaining the high bidders who'd begun arriving in the valley for the annual wine auction. Label envy set in: their champagne almost certainly cost more than we would spend on our entire dinner—atasting menu and a vegetarian menu, each 13 courses long—which, practically unbidden, began its parade from the kitchen. And as delicious as these tiny dishes were, we struggled to keep up with the filmstrip of exquisitely crafted food images that kept advancing. Some dishes, like a braised fennel salad with kumquats and green almonds, were as loosely composed as spilled mercury; others—a pickled, deviled "hen egg" with truffle syrup—were as tightly wound as a Fabergé egg. What they all shared was an impressive intensity of flavor and an almost godlike restraint. Horseradish, in one sauce, was tamed to a tone as mild as milk; snails were a revelation, with the mineral taste of a Pacific oyster, but also grassy and almost embarrassingly naked, tender, pale—barely poached.

When we inquired about the escargot, our waiter told us it had been raised a stone's throw from where we were dining, and we felt compelled to seek out the source. That's how we found ourselves in Peter Jacobsen's backyard the following morning. Jacobsen—the only actual dentist we encountered on our trip—and his wife, Gwen, bought their Yountville property, with its collection of 121 fruit trees, in the early eighties. They kept the fruit trees, added an array of heirloom vegetables and, a few years ago, summoned the courage to drop a box of figs at the French Laundry's door. Now their entire garden's production is under contract to the restaurant, and twice a day chefs harvest cardoon blossoms, la ratte potatoes, wild arugula, tiger figs, and—yes—plump, cornmeal-fed snails.

"We're so lucky we can grow things that don't have to travel far," Jacobsen said, and pointed out that his gardening c0-0p has encouraged several neighbors to get their land certified organic and to grow heirloom vegetables. He compared the small-town network of purveyors to Old Europe, but this place seemed even more inspired—where else in the world does a restaurant turn its neighbors into gardeners?

"St. Helena has attitude," said a waiter drinking at Pancha's, Yountville's dive bar and the after-hours watering hole for restaurant employees in the valley. He was in no shape to elaborate, but we think we know what he meant. The boutiques that stretch along the town's Main Street, such as Footcandy, which carries the latest Edmundo Castillos and Jimmy Choos, and Woodhouse Chocolate, a sparkly gold-leafed store where white-gloved attendants handle chocolates like jewels, seem more St.-Honoré than St. Helena. But there's also a down-home air here, nowhere more evident than at Market, where Douglas Keane—whose stints at Restaurant Gary Danko and Jardinière earned him the San Francisco Chronicle's Rising Star award—is running the kitchen. Ingredients at Market are thoughtfully sourced—the mac 'n' cheese is laced with a smoky, local bacon and aged California cheddar—but it's kid-friendly, too: it offers tableside s'more service.