I’ve been an editor at Hemispheres for 11 years, and in that time I’ve been all around the world: I’ve swum in the Bora Bora Lagoon, stood at Ground Zero in Hiroshima, hand-fed wallabies in Australia, and felt the sands of Ipanema Beach between my toes. Yet perhaps the most meaningful trip I’ve taken in the last decade was to a place just an hour’s drive from my parent’s house. This past March, my sister turned 40—nothing has made me feel quite so old as my little sister’s 40th birthday—and we considered a variety of go-big celebration options. Then, my sister suffered a personal tragedy and decided she didn’t want to embark on any major travels. Hoping to be supportive, I planned to fly from New York City, where I live, to the San Francisco Bay Area, where my family resides. I asked my sister if she wanted to do anything special during my visit, and she requested a day in Napa Valley. This was a wish I was qualified to grant, as I managed the monthly wine column in Hemispheres and have made numerous trips to Napa. I put together a list of options, and ultimately we made appointments at two wineries. First, we’d go to Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, which is famed for making the cabernet sauvignon that beat the best reds from Bordeaux at the 1976 Judgment of Paris. Then, we’d go to Seavey Vineyard, a family-owned property that several of my sources—including Kelli A. White, the director of education at The Wine Center at Meadowood—cited as having one of the best tasting experiences in Wine Country.
Come the beginning of March, my girlfriend and I hopped a flight to San Francisco, and on the big morning we rendezvoused with my sister, her husband, and her high school best friend in the East Bay suburbs. An hour later, we were cruising along the Silverado Trail and turning into the parking lot of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. We were running late, on account of having to drop my 3-year-old niece off with the grandparents, and at first the staff seemed a bit rigid. (Wineries in Napa are busy, especially the famous, appointment-only ones.) Our server took a quick liking to our party, though, and he poured us a couple of extra tastes and let us stay past our allotted time. We sipped those elegant cabs and looked out across the vineyards that produced them, toward the rock formation in the Vaca Mountains that gives the Stags Leap District its name. The vines were bare, and gray clouds glowered above the hills. The valley has a strange, stark beauty about it in winter, but as my sister posed for photos with that scenic backdrop, there was enough sunshine in her smile—an expression that had been rare of late—to make me think she might bring about the changing of the seasons.
We made a quick run into downtown St. Helena to have lunch—sandwiches at The Model Bakery, Oprah’s favorite for English muffins—and then it was on to our next appointment. Seavey is less than five miles from the valley floor, but, tucked up in the quiet hills near Lake Hennessey, it might as well be a world away. We drove a winding road up through gnarled oaks, the hillsides green from the winter rain, and soon we were pulling up to the stone building, once a dairy barn, that houses the winery. Director of hospitality Max Trego welcomed us with glasses of crisp chardonnay and led us on a brief tour.
As we looked out across the rolling, 200-acre estate, one of the winery’s owners, Will Seavey, walked up with an armload of weeds he had just finished clearing. We followed him over to a small corral and chatted with him while he fed the weeds to his goats. We petted his dog. It was all very down-home and pastoral and charming.
Afterward, we went back into the barn and took a table in a cozy tasting room. Trego had already poured flights for us, and we sipped the estate-grown, small-production wines—some of the most highly regarded ones in Napa Valley—and chatted with him and his wife, who sat at a desk in the corner, working on a computer. Between glasses, my sister played with a lazy cat that lounged on the chair against the wall behind her. As a parting gift, Trego gave us a bottle of just-opened 2013 Caravina cabernet, which we took with us to dinner at The Charter Oak in downtown St. Helena. Located in a stately brick building and run by Martina and Christopher Kostow (who earned three Michelin stars at The Restaurant at Meadowood), it’s my favorite place to eat in the valley. We sat beneath the high ceiling and enjoyed that bottle of Caravina, along with fresh vegetables grown on the restaurant’s farm, bread with house-cultured butter, and a big Mount Lassen trout roasted on the open-fire grill across the room. At the end of the meal, I could see on my sister’s face the satiated, slightly soporific smile that accompanies the end of most days in Wine Country.
We travel to open up our worlds, but something I’ve learned is that we also travel to share our worlds. On this day, I was able to share my love of wine and Wine Country with my sister. More importantly, I was able to share with her a bit of much-needed joy. This trip wasn’t anywhere near the longest one I’ve taken, but I would have gone to the ends of the earth for the result: my sister looking at a photo of our group outside Seavey’s stone winery and saying “best day ever.”
